Susan Sontag Quotes About Photography

Quotes about: Photography

• ...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Photograph

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.46, Macmillan

• 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.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, World, Feels

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.24, Macmillan

• The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Pain, Photographer

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.82, Macmillan

• In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Past, America

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.61, Macmillan

• A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Cousin, Often Is

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.10, Macmillan

• Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

  Susan Sontag

  Inspirational, Photography, Today

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.25, Macmillan

• To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Mean, World

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.6, Macmillan

• Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Reality, Ideas

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.78, Macmillan

• It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take 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

  Photography, Art, Twilight

• Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Book, Order

  Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

• 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

  Photography, Light, Resemblance Is

  "On Photography".

• The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Inspire, Lust

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.156, Macmillan

• To photograph is to confer importance.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Photograph, Importance

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.27, Macmillan

• Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Numbers, Cameras

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.17, Macmillan

• In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Majesty, Dwarfs

  "On Photography".

• 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.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Self

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.9, Macmillan

• The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Ideas, Two

• Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Events, Turns

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.81, Macmillan

• Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Lying

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

• In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Vocabulary, Language

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.20, Macmillan

• A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Real, Painting

  New York Review of Books 23 June 1977

• Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Real

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.63, Macmillan

• Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Cameras, Arms

• It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Feelings, Cameras

  Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

• The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Careers

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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