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Susan Sontag -
On Photography (1977)
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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
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
Susan Sontag
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
Susan Sontag
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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag
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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
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
Susan Sontag
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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
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Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Susan Sontag
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Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
Susan Sontag
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
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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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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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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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
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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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Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
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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.
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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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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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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
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Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.
Susan Sontag
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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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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Susan Sontag
Creative Commons
Born:
January 16, 1933
Died:
December 28, 2004
(aged 71)
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