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Quote by Susan Sontag

“Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”

Quote by Susan Sontag

Book:Regarding the Pain of Others

Work

Regarding the Pain of Others

In this thought-provoking work, the author delves into the portrayal of human suffering in photographs, examining the impact and significance of such imagery in the context of war and conflict. more

Author

Susan Sontag was an American writer, critic, and photographer. Known for her unique literary style and profound thinking, her work spans various fields including literature, art, and politics. Born on January 16, 1933, she passed away on December 28, 2004. more

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“Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.”

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Book:On photography

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“In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.”

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Book:Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

“People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.”

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“Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

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“The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.”

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“In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.”

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Book:Paul Strand: essays on his life and work

Source: Paul Strand: essays on his life and work

“... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.”

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“We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.”

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Book:Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values

Source: Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values

“Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.”

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“The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”

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