Source: On Photography
Quotes from book
On Photography
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977.
“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are.”
Source: On Photography
Variant: 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.
Source: On Photography
“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”
"Melancholy Objects", p. 57
On Photography (1977)
"The Heroism of Vision", p. 105
On Photography (1977)
"In Plato's Cave", p. 21
On Photography (1977)
"The Heroism of Vision", p. 85
On Photography (1977)
"America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly", p. 31
On Photography (1977)
"Photographic Evangels", p. 147
On Photography (1977)
"The Image-World", p. 154
On Photography (1977)
“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”
In Plato's Cave, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8DktTyeRNkC&q=%22Photography+has+become+almost+as+widely+practiced+an+amusement+as+sex+and+dancing%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973
On Photography (1977)
“Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.”
"The Image-World", p. 161
On Photography (1977)
Context: Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.
“In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.”
On Photography (1977)
Context: Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.
"America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly", p. 29
