Quotes from Susan Sontag

El fotógrafo saquea y preserva, denuncia y consagra a la vez.

La historia de la fotografía podría recapitularse como la pugna entre dos imperativos diferentes: el embellecimiento, que proviene de las bellas artes, y la veracidad.

She de-realizes her behavior by this sense of tentativeness, reversibility, contingency, arbitrariness of everything she does—and since situations only become real to her after a long time (perhaps never fully so) she has the space—of incomplete commitment, so to speak—to behave destructively, unreliably, erratically, self-indulgently, irresponsibly.

A fotografia, mais recentemente, transformou-se num divertimento tão praticado como o sexo e a dança, o que significa que, como todas as formas de arte de massas, a fotografia não é praticada pela maioria das pessoas como arte. É sobretudo um rito social, uma defesa contra a ansiedade e um instrumento de poder.

I felt I was slumming, in my own life. My task was to ward off the drivel (I felt I was drowning in drivel)—the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromide I heard at home. And the weekly comedy shows festooned with canned laughter, the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games and prize fights—radio, whose racket filled the living room on weekday evenings and much of Saturday and Sunday, was an endless torment.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

If civilization may be defined as that stage of human life at which, objectively, the body becomes a problem, then our moment of civilization may be described as that stage at which we are subjectively aware of, and feel trapped by, this problem. Now we aspire to the life of the body and we reject the ascetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but we are still confined in the generalized sensibility which that religious tradition bequeathed us.

Pavese's continual prayers for the strength to lead a life of rigorous seclusion and solitude ("The only heroic rule is to be alone, alone, alone") are entirely of a piece with his repeated complaints about his inability to feel.

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)

Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one's ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one's ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium.

For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both. –

it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

A necessidade de comprovar a realidade e de engrandecer a experiência através das fotografias é uma forma de consumismo estético a que todos nos entregamos. As sociedades industriais transformam os seus cidadãos em viciados de imagens; trata-se da mais irresistível forma de poluição mental

O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio.

Hay belleza o cuando menos interés en todo, si se ve con un ojo suficientemente perspicaz.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

This happens with special frequency to the writer, like Camus, who appeals directly to a generation's image of what is exemplary in a man in a given historical situation. Unless he possesses extraordinary reserves of artistic originality, his work is likely to seem suddenly denuded after his death.

Ah, these English. So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them. So eccentric, so superficial, so reserved. But how they enjoy themselves.

Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artífice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.

Quando faço uma fotografia, escreve Siskind, quero que seja um objeto onovo, completo e autosuficiente, cuja condição básica é a ordem. Para Cartier-Bresson, tirar fotografias é encontrar a estrutura do mundo, deleitar-se com o prazer puro da forma, revelar que em todo este caos, há ordem.