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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes

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Famous Susan Sontag Quotes

“Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?”

IfsWorldHumansMayMeanArtSelfFormFeltChallengesModernSubjectsPhotographyPhotographSupremeBranchesEnterprisePrincipalTourismEnlargementAbnormalityClandestineArt Photography
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.”

WorldHumansMomentsFormSocialNumbersRecordsPhotographyCamerasRateAvailableDisappearDestroyedLandscapeDevicesThat MomentSocial LifeRate Of Change
Book:On photography
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“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.”

ThinkingWorldTryingHumansMeanMadeUnderstandingHuman BeingsPayAttentionCapablePay AttentionCynicalSuperficialWickedness
Book:Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung
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“Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.”

WorldFeelsShouldCharacterTurnsEasyInterestingSituationMoralEventsCamerasPhotographInterventionMoral Character
Book:On photography
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“Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsWorldWritingHas BeensFactsLastsModernHavensInvolvedActivityMachinesCuriousCopiesOld FashionedDomainTypewritersDuplicateProcessors
Author:Susan Sontag
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“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”

WorldHumansGovernmentChurchWhiteRaceParticularCivilizationRacismCancerAlsGenocideJudaismHuman HistoryNewtonEmancipationAlgebraParliamentaryBaroquePascalWhite RaceWhite GenocideParliamentary Government
Author:Susan Sontag
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“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.”

WorldJoyCitiesEmpathyPhotographerExtremesVersionsLandscapeSolitaryUrbanStalkingWalkersInfernoAdeptConnoisseurPicturesqueVoluptuousStrollers
Book:On photography
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“Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.”

WorldLoveLittlesAgeHouseInterestCoupleMarriedPrivacyHuntingTacitMarried Love
Book:Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
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“Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.”

WorldEndsBodyFormTurnsWomenBeautyCitizensLongingPhotographSurfaceRedemptionCelebrationPollutionIdenticalIrresistibleJunkiePoignantProbingBelow The Surface
Book:On photography
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“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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“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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“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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