Quotes from Susan Sontag

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York's Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero's pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers).

No es del todo erróneo afirmar que no existe una mala fotografía, sino solo fotografías menos interesantes, menos relevantes, menos misteriosas.

Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives. But before being allowed to arrive, it must lay siege to the weary heart. Let me in, it mews, it bellows. The heart must be forced.

In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.

Being self-conscious. Treating one's self as an other. Supervising oneself.

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.

To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one's own expectations.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.

No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.

How can I go on this way? And how can I not?

What is the secret of suddenly beginning to write, finding a voice? Try whiskey. Also being warm.

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

25/12/48 É muito provável que ao lembrar-me disso, um dia, eu ache muita graça. Assim como houve um tempo em que eu era religiosa de um modo neurótico e aterrorizado e achava que um dia seria católica, agora acho que tenho tendências lésbicas (com que relutância escrevo isto) –

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. 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.

Choroba jest nocnÄ… stronÄ… ?ycia, naszym bardziej uci??liwym obywatelstwem. Od dnia narodzin ka?dy z nas posiada bowiem jakby dwa paszporty - przynale?y zarówno do Å›wiata zdrowych, jak i do Å›wiata chorych.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not "Apocalypse Now" but "Apocalypse From Now On.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing "we" can do—but who is that "we"?—and nothing "they" can do either—and who are "they"?—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, 'Alice, Alice, what is the answer?' Her companion replied, 'There is no answer.' Gertrude Stein continued, 'Well, then, what is the question?' and fell back dead.

Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists make drawings and paintings while photographers take photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

I know I'm not myself with people, […] But am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.