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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

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
Hands
Production
Thing
Productions
Weird
Workers
Mass
Writer
Hand
Worker
Artist
Eras

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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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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.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
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You can always be quoted.
Susan Sontag
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag