Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas F. Wilson

I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.

Robert Barry

I don't really use still photography very much anymore except to document my work.

Sydney Pollack

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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 vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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 ...

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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