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
religious talking imagination
Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
photography art real
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
two long shadow
Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.
long important united-states
In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
ideas
Ideas disturb the levelness of life
lying opposites ideas
The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
nostalgic
When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
gun cameras murder
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
play serious frivolous
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
art axes doe
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
attitude style introducing
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
oddities judgment accumulation
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
taste faculty response
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.
ideas people taste
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.