"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 6 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech."
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"One can never ask anyone to change a feeling."
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"One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all."
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"Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art."
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"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."
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"Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives."
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"One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits."
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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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"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs."
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"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."
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"Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability."
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"Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution."
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"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
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"In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life."
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"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."
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"The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion."
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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"
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"Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you."
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