Quote

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.

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
Citizens
Pollution
Junkies
Turn
Industrial
Enhanced
Turns
Photographs
Confirmed
Everyone
Societies
Junkie
Experience
Aesthetic
Needing
Reality
Mental
Consumerism
Form
Photograph
Addicted
Image
Irresistible

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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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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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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
Susan Sontag
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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... 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.
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I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
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