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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

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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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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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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
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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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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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
Susan Sontag
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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We are ruled by quotations.
Susan Sontag
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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