Susan Sontag Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

• The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

  Susan Sontag

  Women, Reality, People

  New York Review of Books 18 Apr. 1974

• Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Drawing, Cameras

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.8, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• 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

• Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Citizens, Pollution

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

• The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

  Susan Sontag

  Party, Reality, Self

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.142, Macmillan

• Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Thinking, Fascination

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.23, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

  Susan Sontag

  Believe, Health, Reality

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

• We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Writing, Mean

• That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Expectations, Humanity

• Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

  Susan Sontag

  Past, Reality, Way

  "A Susan Sontag Reader".

• Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

  Susan Sontag

  Lying, Reality, America

  Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

• Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Reality, Way

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

• Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Wings, Erotic

• Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

  Susan Sontag

  Real, Reality

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

• 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

  Photography, Reality, Self

  Source: ctheory.net

• Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Cameras, Seems

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.500, Macmillan

• I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

  Susan Sontag

  Technology, Reality, People

  Source: ctheory.net

• Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

  Susan Sontag

  Reality, Pieces, World

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

• The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Real

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.129, Macmillan

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