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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

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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
Photography
Implies
Evidence
Biographies
Usually
Ongoing
Painting
Paintings
Pieces
Photographs
History
Unlike
Photographic
Others
Images
Biography
Photograph
Invariably

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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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.
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
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We are ruled by quotations.
Susan Sontag
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan Sontag
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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
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
Susan Sontag
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What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
Susan Sontag
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
Susan Sontag
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Susan Sontag
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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