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A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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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
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
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Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
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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
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So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Susan Sontag
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Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
Susan Sontag
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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
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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
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An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured on digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component.
Susan Sontag
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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
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Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Susan Sontag
Creative Commons
Born:
January 16, 1933
Died:
December 28, 2004
(aged 71)
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