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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

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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
Subliminal
Violate
Photograph
Seeing
Knowledge
Never
People

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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).
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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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.
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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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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.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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