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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

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
Serve
Vigorous
Projects
Victims
Photography
Unfortunate
Purpose
Compassionate
Art
Enterprise
Without
Project
Victimization
Victim
Enterprises
Expected
Concentrating

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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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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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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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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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How boring just to be a body.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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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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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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