Quote

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

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
Knowledge
Never
People
Subliminal
Violate
Photograph
Seeing

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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
I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
Susan Sontag
Image
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
Image
Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
Image
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
Susan Sontag
Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Image
I'm more cautious about what I write.
Susan Sontag
Image
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
Image
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Image
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
Susan Sontag
Image
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
Image
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
Susan Sontag
Image
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
Susan Sontag
Image
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
Susan Sontag
Image
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
Susan Sontag
Image
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
Susan Sontag
Image
Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
Susan Sontag