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.
- Susan Sontag
More Quotes By Susan Sontag
Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter... Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted.... In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real... To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge... Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this... A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
…to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings... Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few... It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a... Sanity is a cozy lie.
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not... We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror....
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