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
idols moral sin
I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
photography numbers records
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.
photography world feels
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 memorable being-me
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
photography art mean
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?
personality half way
A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.
unrequited-love past devotion
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
truth lying party
I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.
photography ongoing pieces
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.
divorce errors birth
Love dies because its birth was an error.
anger made shouting
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
interesting people illness
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
courage fear people
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
intelligent conversation
All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.