Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
Susan Sontag
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Hold
Collect
Results
Photographs
Sense
Heads
Give
Enterprise
Whole
Images
Giving
Photograph
Anthology
World
Finally
Grandiose
Result
Photographic
More quotes by Susan Sontag
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
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
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
Susan Sontag
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
Susan Sontag
The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
Susan Sontag
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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
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
Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
Susan Sontag
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
Susan Sontag
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag
