Quotes from Susan Sontag

Son múltiples los usos para las incontables oportunidades que depara la vida moderna de mirar —con distancia, por el medio de la fotografía— el dolor de otras personas. Las fotografías de una atrocidad pueden producir reacciones opuestas. Una llamada a la paz. Un grito de venganza. O simplemente la confundida conciencia, repostada sin pausa de información fotográfica, de que suceden cosas terribles. Susan Sontag| Ante el dolor de los demás.

To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Recientemente la fotografía se ha transformado en una diversión casi tan cultivada como el sexo y el baile, lo cual significa que la fotografía, como toda forma artística de masas, no es cultivada como tal por la mayoría. Es sobre todo un rito social, una protección contra la ansiedad y un instrumento de poder.

Like other diseases that arouse feelings of shame, AIDS is often a secret, but not from the patient. A cancer diagnosis was frequently concealed from patients by their families; an AIDS diagnosis is at least as often concealed from their families by patients.

What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such—of what lies beyond the human and the made—and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

The function of writing is to explode one's subject—transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations).

Una fotografía es a la vez una pseudopresencia y un signo de ausencia.

I remember expressing amazement (+ feeling superior) when Harriet said once in Paris that she didn`t know whether or not she had been in love with someone. I couldn`t understand what she was talking about. I said that had never happened to me. Of course not. Since for me being in love is deciding: I`m in love + sticking to it, I`m always well informed. -Reborn

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don't appear at all: they are invisible.

Es harto sabido que cuando las personas se aventuran por los confines últimos de la consciencia , arriesgan su cordura, o lo que es lo mismo, su humanidad. La Imaginación Pornográfica

Elites presuppose masses.

When I look at my picture I read stubbornness, balked vanity, panic, vulnerability.)

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing.

Work is experienced as discipline--the background of which is ascesis--even though it also gives pleasure. One is allowed to become depersonalized in work, to forget the self (to lose contact with its most intimate feelings and needs)--indeed all that is necessary if one is to give oneself fully to the work.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

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.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.