Quote

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

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
Really
Photograph
Acquisitive
World
Relation
Nourishes
Illusion
Promotes
Awareness
Detachment
Emotional
Photographs
Seeing
Invites
Understanding
Aesthetic
Giving
Despite

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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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God, living is enormous!
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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