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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes

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Famous Susan Sontag Quotes

“To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.”

WorldMeanArtSeemsEyeIndividualDifferencesPhotographyFundamentalsNotesPhotographerPhotographObjectivesLogicalDocumentsAngleExtensionsSeparatingRecordersNote Taking
Book:On photography
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“Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning.”

BookDifferentUseSeemsPoliticalRoomsSituationMoralEmotionalWallDependsWeightPolicePhotographContactMagazinesSecureSheetsFragmentsFilesDemonstrationGalleryLiving RoomRoom WallLiving Room Wall
Book:On photography
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“Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.”

PeopleWorldFirstsDoeArtRealFeelingsHandsFormDealsKnowingPhotographReal LifeDisappointedCatastropheReal ThingsNature Beauty
Book:On photography
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“It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt”

PersonsArtMomentsVirtueSubjectsRight NowPhotographyPhotographNostalgiaVulnerabilityTouchedMortalityTwilightRelentlessNostalgicFreezingPathosMemento MoriMementoMutability
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”

TwoCultureForceMoralCreativeModernJewCreatorContemporaryIronyMinoritiesSensibilityUrbanHomosexualSeriousnessOutstandingTruestPioneering
Book:A Susan Sontag reader
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“Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”

NeedsMindBookIdeasRealProblemFormPoliticalPoliticsInterestingKnownAliveReal LifeAlsConsensusFrontiersAdversariesMost InterestingHeresyPolitical CorrectnessStaying AliveGreat BookPhilistinesCustodiansInteresting Ideas
Book:A Susan Sontag reader
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“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

WorldWayWellsMayCoursesFoundModernObjectsBecomingConscienceTraditionEngagedIronicQuotationsFragmentsCollectingShatteredCollectorsPiousModern HistoryBecoming OneSalvageQuarry
Author:Susan Sontag
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