Quotes from Susan Sontag

Do stuff, be clenched, curious, not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention, it's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality, it connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager.

the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera

The most precious thing is vitality—not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will+energy+appetite to do what one wants to do+not to be 'sunk' by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at.

The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

A crisis of self-respect. What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. I'm being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt.

No one is a devil if fully heard.

What do I enjoy? Music Being in love Children Sleeping Meat

Remember! X looks abject-lovingly at Y; Y is irritated by mounting self-reproaches, which are resented as being undeserved; Y feels compelled to be brutal to X. Sadism, hostility an essential element in love. Therefore it's important that love be a transaction of hostilities. Lesson: not to surrender one's heart where it's not wanted.

To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.

I received a letter from a close friend. I did not open it for a week. It lay smoldering on my night table. The envelope bearing the name of a mere acquaintance I tore open eagerly as I came up the stairs, confident that the letter inside would contain nothing that could disturb me or hurt me.

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.

camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions

This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, 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.

That there could be death camps and a siege and civilians slaughtered by the thousands and thrown into mass graves on European soil fifty years after the end of the Second World War gave the war in Bosnia and the Serb campaign of killing in Kosovo their special, anachronistic interest. But one of the main ways of understanding the war crimes committed in southeastern Europe in the 1990s has been to say that the Balkans, after all, were never really part of Europe.

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: 'There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.

It used to be thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted.

It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power.

A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertendy in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.

No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Esto es lo que hace la guerra. Y aquello es lo que hace, también. La guerra rasga, desgarra. La guerra rompe, destripa. La guerra abrasa. La guerra desmembra. La guerra arruina.

Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view.

Time evaporate, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected and excitement dug up in barren ground.