Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
understanding promise ease
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.
helping photograph doubtful
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
photography world heroic
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
enormous
God, living is enormous!
transformation minutes interest
The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
voice people tunes
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
ignorance disease theory
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
distance past cities
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.
past quality photograph
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
space theatre use
If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
goal consciousness pornography
... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.
generations spirituality
Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.
journal persons keeping-a-journal
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.
reading book waiting
Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.