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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

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
Question
Issues
Community
Use
Largest
Social
Opens
Reality
Uses
Self
Photography
Relationship

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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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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
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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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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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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.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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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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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?
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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