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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

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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
Although
Paintings
Indeed
Photographs
Painting
Interpretation
Sense
Capture
Reality
Camera
Doe
Cameras
Much
Drawing
Drawings
World
Photograph
Interpret

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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.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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