Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

Susan Sontag

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

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.

Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.

Susan Sontag

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Susan Sontag

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

Ray Harryhausen

I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

Ray Harryhausen

There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

Stephanie Seymour

I really learned a lot from collecting clothes because I got to go back into the history of fashion and fashion photography and jewelry. It changed how I felt about fashion and about what I did forever because I used to look a little bit down on myself for it.

Sophia Bush

So, I'm always around video games but I've always been interested in them from a visual perspective, with the graphic design and that whole thing. I don't know if that comes from my love of photography or what but that's always what's held my interest about them.

Stan Brakhage

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.