Susan Sontag - Images Quotes

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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.

Susan Sontag
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

Susan Sontag
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Susan Sontag
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.

Susan Sontag
The photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering..... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.

Susan Sontag
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Susan Sontag
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

Susan Sontag
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

Susan Sontag
Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations — structures of the imagination — are.

Susan Sontag
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Susan Sontag
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Susan Sontag
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Susan Sontag
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

Susan Sontag
Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs.... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real.... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Susan Sontag
Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Susan Sontag
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.

Susan Sontag
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Susan Sontag