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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.

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
Often
Photography
Letdown
Art
Destiny
Originally
Reality
Role
Accurate
Thought
Objects
Reports
Give
Works
Experienced
Giving
Beyond
Limited
Real
Roles
Object
Taken
Including

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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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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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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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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.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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