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Susan Sontag Quotes about Photography - Page 2

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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

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?

Photography, Art, Mean

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Photography, Art, Real

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.63, Macmillan

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Photography, Art, Careers

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Photography, World, Feels

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.24, Macmillan

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

Photography, Light, Resemblance Is

"On Photography".

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

Photography, Reality, Way

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Photography, Real, Events

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Photography, Travel, Experience

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Photography, People, Chinese

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

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Photography, Ethics, Grammar

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

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Photography, Thinking, People

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Photography, Travel, Home

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

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.

Photography, Art, Lying

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Photography, Art, Self

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.9, Macmillan

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Photography, Photograph, Ugliness

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

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.

Photography, Art, Mean

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.152, Macmillan

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.

Photography, Vocabulary, Language

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.20, Macmillan

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Photography, World, Heroic

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.29, Macmillan

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Photography, Ongoing, Pieces

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

Photography, Feelings, Cameras

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

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Photography, Majesty, Dwarfs

"On Photography".

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

Photography, Ideas, Two

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

Photography, Art, Purpose

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.32, Macmillan

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Photography, Interesting, Mysterious

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.124, Macmillan

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

Photography, Reality, Self

Source: ctheory.net

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