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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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
Photography
Seeing
Firsts
First
Way
More quotes by Susan Sontag
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Susan Sontag
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
Susan Sontag
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
Susan Sontag
All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
Susan Sontag
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Susan Sontag
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
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
I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
Susan Sontag
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
Susan Sontag
Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
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
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
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
Susan Sontag
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
