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
new-year kindness prayer
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
loss culture modern-life
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties
inspirational motivational attitude
It is not the position, but the disposition.
gun people cameras
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. 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.
regret destiny men
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
beauty citizens redemption
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.
photography mean world
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.
art real design
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
self people transformation
I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
intelligent ideas intelligence
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
life-is photograph
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
time moments photograph
To take a 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.
exercise literature ability
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
courage dare urges
I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.