Susan Sontag - On Photography (1977)

75 Sourced Quotes

View all Susan Sontag Quotes
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

Susan Sontag
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

Susan Sontag
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

Susan Sontag
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

Susan Sontag
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Susan Sontag
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Susan Sontag
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

Susan Sontag
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

Susan Sontag
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
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
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
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

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
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Susan Sontag
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.

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
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
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
Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.

Susan Sontag
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
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

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
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Susan Sontag
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

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
Photography is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony.

Susan Sontag
Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Susan Sontag
Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

Susan Sontag
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
To photograph people is to violate them.... It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Susan Sontag