Quotes from Susan Sontag

But also, as with Baldwin, that passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory. The moral imperatives—love, moderation—offered to palliate intolerable historical or metaphysical dilemmas were too general, too abstract, too rhetorical.

La más antigua experiencia del arte tiene que haberlo percibido como encantamiento o magia; el arte era un instrumento del ritual (las pinturas de las cuevas de Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etcétera). La primera teoría del arte, la de los filósofos griegos, proponía que el arte era mímesis, imitación de la realidad.

The joke is this impersonal possession. It doesn't have anyone's signature. It was given to me—but you didn't make it up; it was in my custody, and I chose to pass it on, keep it going. It isn't about any of us. It doesn't describe you or me. It has a life of its own. It goes off—like a pop, like a laugh, a sneeze; like an orgasm; like a little explosion, an overflow. Its telling says, I am here.

A writer who acts as public conscience needs extraordinary nerve and fine instincts, like a boxer. After a time, these instincts inevitably falter. He also needs to be emotionally tough. Camus was not that tough, not tough in the way that Sartre is.

The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding, and remembering.

The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.

muitos fotógrafos continuam a preferir imagens a preto e branco, pois consideram-nas mais delicadas e sóbrias do que a cor - ou menos voyeuristas e menos sentimentais ou cruamente miméticas.

Para ser legítima como arte, la fotografía debe cultivar la noción del fotógrafo como auteur, y de que todas las fotografías realizadas por el mismo individuo configuran un corpus.

Uma sociedade torna-se moderna quando uma das suas principais atividades é produzir e consumir imagens, quando as imagens, que influenciam extraordinariamente a determinação das nossas exigências para com a realidade e são elas mesmas um substituto cobiçado da experiência autêntica, passam a ser indispensáveis para a saúde da economia, para a estabilidade da política e para a procura da felicidade privada.

La fotografía, que tiene tantos usos narcisistas, también es un instrumento poderoso para despersonalizar nuestra relación con el mundo; y ambos usos son complementarios. Como unos binoculares cuyos extremos pueden confundirse, la cámara vuelve íntimas y cercanas las cosas exóticas, y pequeñas, abstractas, extrañas y lejanas las cosas familiares.

Yes, eyes are special. But besides the eyes of the flesh, which are mostly water, there are the secret eyes. Don't you know, that you can really see? In a way most people can't. And that most of what people are looking at is just debris.

Two weeks after the flight of the government from Naples, the French moved an army of six thousand soldiers into the city, and by late January a cabal of enlightened aristocrats and professors had engendered a monstrosity that called itself the Parthenopean or Vesuvian Republic. Most

How far from the beginning are we? When did we first start to feel the wound? … This staunchless wound, the great longing for another place. To make this place another.

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

O objetivo dos retratos das famílias burguesas nos séculos XVIII e XIX era confirmar uma imagem ideal do modelo (proclamando o seu estatuto social e embelezando a sua aparência); em função deste propósito, é fácil compreender porque é que as pessoas não sentiam necessidade de ter mais do que um retrato. O que o registo fotográfico confirma é, mais modestamente, que a pessoa existe; por isso eles nunca são demais.

I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets.

Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna

And about the staggering prediction made recently by the World Health Organization that, barring improbably rapid progress in the development of a vaccine, there will be ten to twenty times more AIDS cases in the next five years than there were in the last five, it is assumed that most of these millions will be Africans.

The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.

The Camp insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful.)

This is America, [...] where the maudlin happy end is as appreciated as a bout of self-righteous, gleeful slaughter.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois.