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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
Seeing
Invites
Understanding
Aesthetic
Giving
Despite
Really
Photograph
Acquisitive
World
Relation
Nourishes
Illusion
Promotes
Awareness
Detachment
Emotional
Photographs
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Courage is morally neutral.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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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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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
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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.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
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