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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
Susan Sontag
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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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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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
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I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
Susan Sontag
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
Susan Sontag
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
Susan Sontag
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Susan Sontag
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
Susan Sontag
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
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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?
Susan Sontag
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
Susan Sontag
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag