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
asthmatic bank beastly bleeding city close cosmic data fairly jungle neither nor printed
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.
fantastic follow knowing priorities trying
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you.
american-author opposite truth
The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
commercial gifted merely naive practiced
Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals,
intelligent people care
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
opening-up healthy doe
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
intelligent ideas intelligence
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
time moments photograph
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
kind wanted
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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.
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.
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.
envy people attention
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
nostalgic
But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures