Quote

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Feels
Driven
Tourism
Work
Using
Imitation
Something
Supposed
Vacation
Like
Travel
Friendly
Fun
Camera
Working
Pictures
Take
Cameras
Feel
Anxiety
Appease

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
Susan Sontag
Image
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
Image
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
Image
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
Image
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
Susan Sontag
Image
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
Susan Sontag
Image
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
Susan Sontag
Image
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
Image
Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
Image
A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
Susan Sontag
Image
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
Susan Sontag
Image
What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
Susan Sontag
Image
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
Susan Sontag
Image
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag