Famous Quotes & Sayings

Susan Sontag

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Susan Sontag

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

Susan Sontag

Photographers are always imposing

Susan Sontag

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Susan Sontag

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Susan Sontag

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Susan Sontag

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

Susan Sontag

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Susan Sontag

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

Susan Sontag

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

Susan Sontag

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.

Susan Sontag

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images ...

Susan Sontag

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Susan Sontag

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Susan Sontag

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Susan Sontag

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Susan Sontag

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.

Susan Sontag

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Susan Sontag

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Susan Sontag

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Susan Sontag

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Susan Sontag

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

Susan Sontag

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

Susan Sontag

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Susan Sontag

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Susan Sontag

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Susan Sontag

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Susan Sontag

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Susan Sontag

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

Susan Sontag

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Susan Sontag

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Susan Sontag

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.