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
Moment
Melt
Moments
Relentless
Another
Participate
Persons
Mortality
Person
Photographs
Slicing
Take
Vulnerability
Mutability
Time
Precisely
Testify
Photograph
Freezing

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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
Susan Sontag
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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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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A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
Susan Sontag
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
Susan Sontag
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
Susan Sontag
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Susan Sontag