Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
book writing levels
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.
tragedy comedy detachment
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
war weather affair
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
easier endure changed
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
mean trying resentment
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.
mean thinking interesting
It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
photography reality way
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 ...
photography travel experience
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.
photography ethics grammar
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.
photography use cameras
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
photography travel home
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
photography memorable being-me
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
photography people chinese
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
photography thinking people
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.