In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” — 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
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. — 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
“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
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself… — 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
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
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
Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone… — 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
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
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people,… — 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 are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists "make" drawings and paintings while… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs. — 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
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. — 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
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked… — 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
