Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Susan Sontag Quotes about Reality

All Susan Sontag Quotes Age Aids Anxiety Art Awareness Beauty Cancer Change Character Comedy Communism Community Consciousness Country Criticism Culture Death Desire Destiny Detachment Dying Energy Evidence Exercise Failing Feelings Funny Giving Health Heart History Identity Illness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judgment Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Nature Pain Painting Passion Past Perfection Photography Pleasure Pollution Purpose Quality Reading Reality quotes Revenge Risk Sexuality Silence Style Suffering Surrealism Today Tradition Tragedy Transformation Travel Understanding Values Violence Waiting War Writing

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Women, Reality, People

New York Review of Books 18 Apr. 1974

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

Reality, Drawing, Cameras

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.8, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

Reality, Thinking, Fascination

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.23, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

Reality, Expectations, Humanity

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

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

Reality, Citizens, Pollution

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

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

Real, Reality

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

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Past, Reality, Way

"A Susan Sontag Reader".

I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

Technology, Reality, People

Source: ctheory.net

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

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Reality, Pieces, World

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

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

Believe, Health, Reality

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

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

Lying, Reality, America

Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Reality, Cameras, Seems

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.500, Macmillan

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

Reality, Wings, Erotic

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

Party, Reality, Self

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.142, 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

You May Also Like: