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
museums grandparent generations
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
cities empathy joy
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.
compassion bored cynical
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.
dream follow-your-dreams
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
use-it-or-lose-it use needs
What we need is to use what we have.
beauty time past
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
health sick citizens
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
waiting solitude able
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
sleep writing want
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.
work ambition doe
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
photography cousin often-is
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
photography book order
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
envy people attention
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
taken writing body
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.