Quote

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

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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
Susan Sontag
Image
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
Image
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
Susan Sontag
Image
... 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.
Susan Sontag
Image
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
Susan Sontag
Image
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
Image
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
Susan Sontag
Image
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
Image
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
Susan Sontag
Image
And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
Susan Sontag
Image
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
Image
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
Image
The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
Susan Sontag
Image
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
Susan Sontag
Image
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
Susan Sontag
Image
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
Susan Sontag
Image
When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
Susan Sontag
Image
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
Susan Sontag
Image
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