A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
