Susan Sontag On Photography Quotes

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.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

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.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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.

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.

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.

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

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Desire has no history...

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

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.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.

That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen —o más bien sientan, intuyan— qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia».

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon—one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology.

Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” Bourgeois families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the family’s status, whereas today the family album of photographs verifies the individual’s existence: the camera helps to weaken the older idea of development as moral education and to promote a more passive idea according to which development consists of passing through the stages of life at the right time and in the right order.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.

Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

Una fotografía es a la vez una pseudopresencia y un signo de ausencia.

El tiempo termina por elevar casi todas las fotografías, aun las más inexpertas, a la altura del arte.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words,

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.

A câmera faz com que todos sejam turistas na realidade alheia e, eventualmente, na sua própria.

La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

Algo feo o grotesco puede ser conmovedor porque la atención del fotógrafo lo ha dignificado. Algo bello puede ser objeto de sentimientos tristes porque ha envejecido o decaído o ya no existe. Todas las fotografías son memento morí. Hacer una fotografía es participar de la mortalidad, vulnerabilidad, mutabilidad de otra persona o cosa. Precisamente porque seccionan un momento y lo congelan, todas las fotografías atestiguan la despiadada disolución del tiempo.

Recientemente la fotografía se ha transformado en una diversión casi tan cultivada como el sexo y el baile, lo cual significa que la fotografía, como toda forma artística de masas, no es cultivada como tal por la mayoría. Es sobre todo un rito social, una protección contra la ansiedad y un instrumento de poder.

No sería erróneo hablar de una compulsión a fotografiar: a transformar la experiencia misma en una manera de ver.

El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.

Fotografiar es apropiarse de lo fotografiado. Significa establecer con el mundo una relación determinada que parece conocimiento, y por lo tanto poder.

Toda a capacidade de compreender está enraizada na capacidade de dizer não.

Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers).

Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

El vasto catálogo fotográfico de la miseria y la injusticia en el mundo entero le ha dado a cada cual determinada familiaridad con lo atroz, volviendo más ordinario lo horrible, haciéndolo familiar.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

La foto del amante escondida en la billetera de una mujer casada, el cartel fotográfico de una estrella de rock fijado sobre la cama de una adolescente, el retrato de propaganda del político prendido a la solapa del votante, las instantáneas de los hijos del taxista en la visera: todos los usos talismánicos de las fotografías expresan una actitud sentimental e implícitamente mágica; son tentativas de alcanzar o apropiarse de otra realidad.

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it— say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

A fotografia, mais recentemente, transformou-se num divertimento tão praticado como o sexo e a dança, o que significa que, como todas as formas de arte de massas, a fotografia não é praticada pela maioria das pessoas como arte. É sobretudo um rito social, uma defesa contra a ansiedade e um instrumento de poder.

El acto fotográfico, un modo de certificar la experiencia, es también un modo de rechazarla: cuando se confina a la búsqueda de lo fotogénico, cuando se convierte la experiencia en una imagen, un recuerdo. El viaje se transforma en una estrategia para acumular fotos. La propia actividad fotográfica es tranquilizadora, y mitiga esa desorientación general que se suele agudizar con los viajes.

The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York’s Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.

No es igual citar una película que citar un libro. Mientras el tiempo de lectura de un libro depende del lector, el del visionado de una película está determinado por el realizador, y las imágenes se perciben con la rapidez o lentitud que permite el montaje. Así como una fotografía fija, que permite demorarnos cuanto nos apetezca en un solo momento, contradice la forma misma de la película, un conjunto de fotografías que congela momentos en la vida o en la sociedad contradice su forma, la cual es un proceso, un caudal en el tiempo. El mundo fotografiado entabla con el mundo real la misma relación, esencialmente inexacta, que las fotografías fijas con las películas. La vida no consiste en detalles significativos, iluminados con un destello, fijados para siempre. Las fotografías sí.

Fotografiar es esencialmente un acto de no intervención. La persona que interviene no puede registrar; la persona que registra no puede intervenir.

Hay algo depredador en la acción de hacer una foto. Fotografiar personas es violarlas, pues se las ve como jamás se ven a sí mismas, se las conoce como nunca pueden conocerse; transforma a las personas en objetos que pueden ser poseídos simbólicamente. Así como la cámara es una sublimación del arma, fotografiar a alguien es cometer un asesinato sublimado, un asesinato blando, digno de una época triste, atemorizada.

Sufrir es una cosa; otra es convivir con las imágenes fotográficas del sufrimiento, que no necesariamente fortifican la conciencia ni la capacidad de compasión. También pueden corromperlas. Una vez que se han visto tales imágenes, se recorre la pendiente de ver más. Y más. Las imágenes pasman. Las imágenes anestesian.

Fotografiar es conferir importancia. Quizás no haya tema que no pueda ser embellecido; es más, no hay modo de suprimir la tendencia intrínseca de toda fotografía a dar valor a sus temas.

On Photography (Sontag, Susan) - Your Highlight on page 34 | location 419-420 | Added on Saturday, 20 September 2014 20:35:09 “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

On Photography (Sontag, Susan) - Your Highlight on page 41 | location 513-513 | Added on Saturday, 20 September 2014 20:43:40 The important thing is not to blink.

cada vez es menos factible reflexionar sobre nuestra experiencia siguiendo la distinción entre imágenes y cosas, entre copias y originales

Así como la pintura se ha vuelto cada vez más conceptual, la poesía se ha definido cada vez más por su interés en lo visual.

Susan Sontag has made perceptive remarks on the role of the photographed image in our perception of the world. She writes, for instance, of a ‘mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs’,60 and argues that ‘the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera’,61 and that ‘the omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.’62

queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not.

Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna

O objetivo dos retratos das famílias burguesas nos séculos XVIII e XIX era confirmar uma imagem ideal do modelo (proclamando o seu estatuto social e embelezando a sua aparência); em função deste propósito, é fácil compreender porque é que as pessoas não sentiam necessidade de ter mais do que um retrato. O que o registo fotográfico confirma é, mais modestamente, que a pessoa existe; por isso eles nunca são demais.

As fotografias eram vistas como um modo de dar informação a pessoas que não tinham o hábito da leitura. o Daily News ainda se autodenomina New York's Picture Newspaper, apelando a uma identificação populista. No extremo oposto da escala, o Le Monde, um jornal destinado a leitores preparados, bem informados, não utiliza quaisquer fotografias, pois pressupõe-se que, para os seus leitores, a fotografia só serviria de ilustração para a análise contida num artigo.

(...) escreve Arbus, "foi nunca ter enfrentado qualquer adversidade. Encontrava-me confinada a uma sensação de irrealidade... E, por mais absurdo que pareça, a sensação de imunidade era dolorosa" Sentindo um descontentamento semelhante, West conseguiu, em 1927, um emprego como rececionista noturno num deprimente hotel de Manhattan. A maneira de Arbus procurar experiências e, por isso, adquirir um sentido de realidade, foi a câmera. (...) O interesse de Arbus pelos freaks exprime um desejo de violar a sua própria inocência.

Quando faço uma fotografia", escreve Siskind, "quero que seja um objeto onovo, completo e autosuficiente, cuja condição básica é a ordem." Para Cartier-Bresson, tirar fotografias é "encontrar a estrutura do mundo, deleitar-se com o prazer puro da forma", revelar que "em todo este caos, há ordem".

(...) muitos fotógrafos continuam a preferir imagens a preto e branco, pois consideram-nas mais delicadas e sóbrias do que a cor - ou menos "voyeuristas" e menos sentimentais ou cruamente miméticas.

Uma sociedade torna-se "moderna" quando uma das suas principais atividades é produzir e consumir imagens, quando as imagens, que influenciam extraordinariamente a determinação das nossas exigências para com a realidade e são elas mesmas um substituto cobiçado da experiência autêntica, passam a ser indispensáveis para a saúde da economia, para a estabilidade da política e para a procura da felicidade privada.

Quanto mais retrocedemos na história menos nítida é a distinção entre imagens e coisas reais, como observou E.H. Gombrich; nas sociedades primitivas, a coisa e a sua imagem não eram mais do que duas manifestações diferentes, ou seja, fisicamente distintas, da mesma energia ou espírito. A isso se deve a suposta eficácia das imagens para propiciar e controlar presenças de grande poder. Esses poderes, essas presenças estavam presentes nelas.

A necessidade de comprovar a realidade e de engrandecer a experiência através das fotografias é uma forma de consumismo estético a que todos nos entregamos. As sociedades industriais transformam os seus cidadãos em viciados de imagens; trata-se da mais irresistível forma de poluição mental

O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio.

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. —SUSAN SONTAG, ON PHOTOGRAPHY

No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.

the earliest surreal photographs come from the 1850s, when photographers first went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, and New York, looking for their unposed slice of life. These photographs, concrete, particular, anecdotal (except that the anecdote has been effaced)—moments of lost time, of vanished customs—seem far more surreal to us now than any photograph rendered abstract and poetic by superimposition, under-printing, solarization, and the like. Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class.

The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions,

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.