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
interesting people illness
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
photography interesting mysterious
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
writing interesting might
Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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.
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.
beautiful appreciation interesting
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
art thinking interesting
Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.
ideas interesting heresy
The only interesting ideas are heresies
interesting history answers
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
art artistic beauty decay durable extremely moral morality nowhere physical rapidly tendency
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
captions depict suffering
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
candid doctors fear keeps
It is only the fear of malpractice that keeps doctors candid in this country.
commercial gifted merely naive practiced
Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals,
cope equally large people popular seemingly served threat twin
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.