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
pain taken people
No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
kind wanted
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
tired persons
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
successful self feelings
Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
wish becoming recognition
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
gun people cameras
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
photography photograph
...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
creativity men boredom
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
feelings asks
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
women reality people
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
photography past america
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
photography mean world
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
want
In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
different needs steel
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.