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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
Ideas
Counts
Little
Questioning
World
Instrument
Photographer
Instruments
Intrepid
Photography
Antithetical
Two
Insofar
Littles
Subjectivity

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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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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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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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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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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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