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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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
Two
Insofar
Littles
Subjectivity
Ideas
Counts
Little
Questioning
World
Instrument
Photographer
Instruments
Intrepid
Photography
Antithetical
More quotes by Susan Sontag
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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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
Susan Sontag
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
Susan Sontag
The really important thing is not to reject anything.
Susan Sontag
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
Susan Sontag
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Susan Sontag
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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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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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
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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.
Susan Sontag
Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
Susan Sontag
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
What we need is to use what we have.
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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
Susan Sontag