Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Umberto Eco

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

Rick Steves

I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field.

Vik Muniz

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

Vik Muniz

I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

Subcomandante Marcos

For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.

Steve Coleman

Laugh, love, dream, strive, smile, feel, joy, look, try, fail, read, walk, search, share, help, work, fun, learn, retry, sweat, cry, rest, wait, fear, hope, trust, pride... when we have lived all of these, our photography might stop being a record of what our camera sees and become an expression of what we as photographers feel.

Stephen Sprouse

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

Stephen Sprouse

The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

Stephen Sprouse

I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.

Stephen Sondheim

Only capitalists get photographers.

Ruth Bernhard

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe.

Ruth Bernhard

Photography is art when it's used by an artist.