Quote

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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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Time
Precisely
Testify
Photograph
Freezing
Moment
Melt
Moments
Relentless
Another
Participate
Persons
Mortality
Person
Photographs
Slicing
Take
Vulnerability
Mutability

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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
Susan Sontag