Quotes from Susan Sontag

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to care more.

La actitud realmente seria es aquella que interpreta el arte como un medio para lograr algo que quizá sólo se puede alcanzar cuando se abandona el arte

Often something looks, or is felt to look, better in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words

BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs's work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable "effects." Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal.

the war goes on—an ache in the bones, an ache in the gut, an ache in the heart.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

However painful they were, I needed my dreams—the metaphor for my introspection—if I was ever to be at peace.

As long as art is understood and valued as an "absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.

Did I feel all that? So much? As sounds decays into inadudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.

She increases her burden of self-hatred, she behaves destructively with people she loves.

La foto del amante escondida en la billetera de una mujer casada, el cartel fotográfico de una estrella de rock fijado sobre la cama de una adolescente, el retrato de propaganda del político prendido a la solapa del votante, las instantáneas de los hijos del taxista en la visera: todos los usos talismánicos de las fotografías expresan una actitud sentimental e implícitamente mágica; son tentativas de alcanzar o apropiarse de otra realidad.

El vasto catálogo fotográfico de la miseria y la injusticia en el mundo entero le ha dado a cada cual determinada familiaridad con lo atroz, volviendo más ordinario lo horrible, haciéndolo familiar.

La cámara transforma a cualquiera en turista de la realidad de otras personas, y a la larga de la propia.

a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech

The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do.

Fotografiar es apropiarse de lo fotografiado. Significa establecer con el mundo una relación determinada que parece conocimiento, y por lo tanto poder.

La pobreza no es más surreal que la riqueza; un cuerpo vestido con harapos mugrosos no es más surreal que una princesa vestida para un baile o un desnudo prístino.

The Queen had real power, and a woman in power, feared as virile, is often accused of being a slut.

And the cancer deaths of those harder to describe as losers, like Freud and Wittgenstein, have been diagnosed as the gruesome penalty exacted for a lifetime of instinctual renunciation. (Few remember that Rimbaud died of cancer.)

SavaÅŸ fotoÄŸraflar?nda güzellik görmek, kalpsizlikle eÅŸ anlaml? say?lmaktad?r.

To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies "severe" measures.