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Susan Sontag Quotes about Photography

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...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Photography, Photograph

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.46, Macmillan

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Photography, Pain, Photographer

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.82, Macmillan

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Inspirational, Photography, Today

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.25, Macmillan

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Photography, Inspire, Lust

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.156, Macmillan

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Photography, Cameras, Use

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.8, Macmillan

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Photography, Photographer, Preserves

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.58, Macmillan

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Photography, Reality, Ideas

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.78, Macmillan

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

Photography, Mean, World

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.6, Macmillan

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.

Photography, Memorable, Being Me

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.126, Macmillan

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.

Photography, Numbers, Cameras

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.17, Macmillan

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Photography, Cameras, Arms

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Photography, Book, Order

Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Photography, Art, Real

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.129, Macmillan

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Photography, Art, Twilight

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.16, Macmillan

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Photography, Real, Painting

New York Review of Books 23 June 1977

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

Photography, Photograph

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Photography, Past, America

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.61, Macmillan

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Photography, World, Photograph

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.5, Macmillan

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Photography, Cousin, Often Is

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.10, Macmillan

To photograph is to confer importance.

Photography, Photograph, Importance

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.27, Macmillan

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Photography, Way, Firsts

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.162, Macmillan

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Beautiful, Photography, Successful

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.76, Macmillan

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

Photography, Events, Turns

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.81, Macmillan

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

Photography, Art, Twilight

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

Photography, Men, Vocation

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.99, Macmillan

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