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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.

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
World
Social
Rate
Devices
Duplicating
Moments
Photography
Landscape
Untold
Form
Record
Disappear
Undergo
Change
Number
Destroyed
Disappearing
Human
Records
Cameras
Span
Humans
Numbers
Began
Device
Time
Started
Forms
Biological
Life
Moment
Available
Brief

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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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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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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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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!
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
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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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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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Desire has no history.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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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.
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