Quote

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

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
Something
Photographs
Proven
Shown
Photograph
Evidence
Hear
Doubt
Seems
Furnish

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag
Image
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Susan Sontag
Image
Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
Susan Sontag
Image
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
Susan Sontag
Image
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
Susan Sontag
Image
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
Image
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
Susan Sontag
Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Image
Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
Image
Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
Susan Sontag
Image
I'm more cautious about what I write.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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