Quotes from book
On Photography

Name: On Photography
Author: Susan Sontag

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.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Susan Sontag book 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

“Desire has no history…”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"Melancholy Objects", p. 57
On Photography (1977)

“The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"The Heroism of Vision", p. 105
On Photography (1977)

“The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

On Photography

“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"In Plato's Cave", p. 21
On Photography (1977)

“So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"The Heroism of Vision", p. 85
On Photography (1977)

“Evans wanted his photographs to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely creditable today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly", p. 31
On Photography (1977)

“The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"Photographic Evangels", p. 147
On Photography (1977)

“Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"The Image-World", p. 154
On Photography (1977)

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

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 <br class="br">Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973 <br class="br">On Photography (1977)

“Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"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.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

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