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
people television way
I love to read the way people love to watch television.
transformation minutes interest
The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
voice people tunes
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
views mourning celebrate
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
world ifs has-beens
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
writing lakes decision
It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
world literature translations
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
photography world heroic
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
helping photograph doubtful
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
understanding promise ease
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.
memories museums western
The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.
character interesting events
Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.
Courage is morally neutral.
photography art purpose
... 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.