Susan Sontag Quotes About Photography
-
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
→ -
To collect photographs is to collect the world.
→ -
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.
→ -
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
→ -
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
→ -
To photograph is to confer importance.
→ -
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
→ -
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
→ -
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.
→ -
Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
→ -
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.
→ -
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
→ -
The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
→ -
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
→ -
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
→ -
... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
→ -
...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
→ -
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
→ -
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.
→ -
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
→ -
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
→ -
Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?
→ -
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
→ -
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.
→ -
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
→ -
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
→ -
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
→
Related Authors
-
Simone de Beauvoir Writer -
Virginia Woolf Writer -
Leni Riefenstahl Film director -
Nancy Kates Filmmaker -
Umberto Eco Essayist -
Walter Benjamin Literary critic -
Annie Leibovitz Photographer -
John Berger Art critic -
Roland Barthes Philosopher -
Marina Abramovic Artist -
Camille Paglia Teacher -
Diane Arbus Photographer -
Maria Popova Writer -
Philip Rieff Cultural critic -
Elfriede Jelinek Playwright -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Joan Didion Author -
Edward Said Professor -
Maria Irene Fornes Playwright -
Norman Mailer Novelist