Quotes from Susan Sontag

Hay algo depredador en la acción de hacer una foto. Fotografiar personas es violarlas, pues se las ve como jamás se ven a sí mismas, se las conoce como nunca pueden conocerse; transforma a las personas en objetos que pueden ser poseídos simbólicamente. Así como la cámara es una sublimación del arma, fotografiar a alguien es cometer un asesinato sublimado, un asesinato blando, digno de una época triste, atemorizada.

Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

A completely open, unpredictable future makes me horribly anxious… It's as if I'm supposed to walk through a forest without being allowed to inform myself whether or not it's full of wolves.

Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Susan Sontag Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57. Also What's Happening in America (1966) The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history

As the old advertising slogan of Paris Match, founded in 1949, had it: "The weight of words, the shock of photos." The hunt for more dramatic (as they're often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value.

the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show "still." You can just show him being alive.

Pašovi invited me to see his Grad (City), a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors;

At the moment when "art" comes into being, the modern period of art begins.

queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not.

Eu estava pensando, Ursula disse a Quentin, que a diferença entre uma história e uma pintura ou uma fotografia é que numa história você pode escrever Ele continua vivo. Mas numa pintura ou numa foto não dá para representar esse continua. Você pode apenas mostrá-lo estando vivo. Ele continua vivo, Stephen disse.

Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an ecology of images? There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.

The Cavaliere is no democrat. But his chilly heart is not insensitive to a certain idea of justice. Not for him the behavior of his grandfather, of whom it is told that he brained a serving boy while drunk in a tavern near London, and retired without realizing what he had done. The distraught taverner followed him to his room and said, "My lord, do you know that you killed that boy?" Stammered the Cavaliere's ancestor: "Put him on the bill." *

Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer's response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

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

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.