Background Image

...

Because Each Photograph Is Only A Fragment, Its Moral And Emotional Weight Depends On Where It Is Inserted. A Photograph Changes According To The Context In Which It Is Seen: Thus Smith's Minamata Photographs Will Seem Different On A Contact Sheet, In A Gallery, In A Political Demonstration, In A Police File, In A Photographic Magazine, In A Book, On A Living-room Wall. Each O These Situations Suggest A Different Use For The Photographs But None Can Secure Their Meaning.

-Susan Sontag

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Because Each Photograph Is

Susan Sontag

...

Because Each Photograph Is Only A Fragment, Its Moral And Emotional Weight Depends On Where It Is Inserted. A Photograph Changes According To The Context In Which It Is Seen: Thus Smith's Minamata Photographs Will Seem Different On A Contact Sheet, In A Gallery, In A Political Demonstration, In A Police File, In A Photographic Magazine, In A Book, On A Living-room Wall. Each O These Situations Suggest A Different Use For The Photographs But None Can Secure Their Meaning.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Susan Sontag

It Is Not Suffering As Such That Is Most Deeply Feared But Suffering That Degrades.

World Suffering

The Western Memory Museum Is Now Mostly A Visual One.

The Quote Is Always Fascinating Because It Changes Out Of Context, Becomes Different And Sometimes More Mysterious. It Has A Directness And Assertiveness It May Not Have Had In The Original. I Think The Quality Of Inaccessibility, The Mystery, Is Important - That Whatever Matters Can't Be Taken In On Just One Reading Or One Seeing. This Is Certainly A Quality Of The Little Of Art That Lasts.

She Felt Herself Needing More And More Sleep. When She Awoke In The Morning, She Thought Of When She Might Lie Down Again - And When She Would Sleep. She Started Going To The Movies.

Ours Is An Age Which Consciously Pursues Health, And Yet Only Believes In The Reality Of Sickness.

Photography Is A Kind Of Overstatement, A Heroic Copulation With The Material World.

If Within The Last Century Art Conceived As An Autonomous Activity Has Come To Be Invested With An Unprecedented Stature - The Nearest Thing To A Sacramental Human Activity Acknowledged By Secular Society - It Is Because One Of The Tasks Art Has Assumed Is Making Forays Into And Taking Up Positions On The Frontiers Of Consciousness (often Very Dangerous To The Artist As A Person) And Reporting Back What's There.

Secular Society

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

Any Sensibility Which Can Be Crammed Into The Mold Of A System, Or Handled With The Rough Tools Of Proof, Is No Longer Sensibility At All. It Has Hardened Into An Idea.

Using Quotations Was At First Quite Spontaneous For Me, But Then This Use Became Strengthened Through Reflection. But Originally This Practice Came Out Of Temperament.

Life Is Not Significant Details, Illuminated By A Flash, Fixed Forever. Photographs Are.

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.

It Is The Nature Of Aphoristic Thinking To Be Always In A State Of Concluding; A Bid To Have The Final Word Is Inherent In All Powerful Phrase-making.

Cancer Is A Demonic Pregnancy.

[o]ne Person's 'barbarian' Is Another Person's 'just Doing What Everybody Else Is Doing.

Art Is The Most General Condition Of The Past In The Present. ... Perhaps No Work Of Art Is Art. It Can Only Become Art, When It Is Part Of The Past. In This Normative Sense, A 'contemporary' Work Of Art Would Be A Contradiction - Except So Far As We Can, In The Present, Assimilate The Present To The Past.

Any Important Disease Whose Causality Is Murky, And For Which Treatment Is Ineffectual, Tends To Be Awash In Significance.

Music Is At Once The Most Wonderful, The Most Alive Of All The Arts- It Is The Most Abstract, The Most Perfect, The Most Pure- And The Most Sensual. I Listen With My Body And It Is My Body That Aches In Response To The Passion And Pathos Embodied In This Music.

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.

If An Irreducible Distinction Between Theatre And Cinema Does Exist, It May Be This: Theatre Is Confined To A Logical Or Continuous Use Of Space. Cinemahas Access To An Alogical Or Discontinuous Use Of Space.

It Is Easier To Endure Than To Change. But Once One Has Changed, What Was Endured Is Hard To Recall.

My Emotional Life: Dialectic Between Craving For Privacy And Need To Submerge Myself In A Passionate Relationship To Another.

The Quality Of American Life Is An Insult To The Possibilities Of Human Growth... The Pollution Of American Space, With Gadgetry And Cars And Tv And Box Architecture, Brutalizes The Senses, Making Gray Neurotics Of Most Of Us, And Perverse Spiritual Athletes And Strident Self-transcenders Of The Best Of Us.

...to Photograph Is To Frame, And To Frame Is To Exclude.

The Culture-heroes Of Our Liberal Bourgeois Civilisation Are Ant-liberal And Ant-bourgeois . . .

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples.

Intelligence Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing, Something To Value Or Cultivate. It's More Like A Fifth Wheel - Necessary Or Desirable When Things Break Down. When Things Go Well, It's Better To Be Stupid ... Stupidity Is As Much A Value As Intelligence.

His View Of Time, And Of Change, Has Become That Of Most Elderly People: He Hates Change, Since For Him - For His Body - Any Change Is For The Worse. And If There Is To Be Change, Then He Wants It To Happen Quickly, So It Does Not Use Up Too Much Of The Time Remaining To Him.

Someone Who Is Perennially Surprised That Depravity Exists, Who Continues To Feel Disillusioned (even Incredulous) When Confronted With Evidence Of What Humans Are Capable Of Inflicting In The Way Of Gruesome, Hands-on Cruelties Upon Other Humans, Has Not Reached Moral Or Psychological Adulthood.

The Life Of The Creative Man Is Lead, Directed And Controlled By Boredom. Avoiding Boredom Is One Of Our Most Important Purposes.

[on Marriage:] It Is An Institution Committed To The Dulling Of The Feelings.

Left-wing Movements Have Tended To Be Unisex, And Asexual In Their Imagery. Right-wing Movements, However Puritanical And Repressive The Realities They Usher In, Have An Erotic Surface. Certainly Nazism Is "sexier" Than Communism.

Although None Of The Rules For Becoming More Alive Is Valid, It Is Healthy To Keep On Formulating Them.

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.

Tamed As It May Be, Sexuality Remains One Of The Demonic Forces In Human Consciousness - Pushing Us At Intervals Close To Taboo And Dangerous Desires, Which Range From The Impulse To Commit Sudden Arbitrary Violence Upon Another Person To The Voluptuous Yearning For The Extinction Of One's Consciousness, For Death Itself. Even On The Level Of Simple Physical Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles Having An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

A Lot Of What I've Written In Criticism Of My Lust For Virtue - My Discovery That I've Committed Idolatry, Making Of The Good An Idol - Is Open To The Charge Of Being Still Caught Within The Dialectic Of Idolatry. I've Made A Moral Criticism Of My Moral Consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

I Discovered That I Am Tired Of Being A Person. Not Just Tired Of Being The Person I Was, But Any Person At All

The Painter Constructs, The Photographer Discloses.

Currently Intellectuals In Western Europe And North America Are Extremely Demoralized And Shaken By The Rise Of A Virulent Conservative Tendency (which Some Have Even Joined).

Societies Need To Have One Illness Which Becomes Identified With Evil, And Attaches Blame To Its Victims.

Writers Are Makers, Not Just Transmitters, Of Myths. Literature Offers Not Only Myths But Counter-myths, Just As Life Offers Counter-experiences - Experiences That Confound What You Thought You Thought, Or Felt, Or Believed.

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History; It Is The White Race And It Alone — Its Ideologies And Inventions — Which Eradicates Autonomous Civilizations Wherever It Spreads, Which Has Upset The Ecological Balance Of The Planet, Which Now Threatens The Very Existence Of Life Itself.

I'm Not Interested In Giving Aid And Comfort To The Neo-conservatives.

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 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.

A Good Listener: A Physical Presence That Is Warm, Alert, Intelligent - More Important Than Any Words.

I'm Not Sure At All That Literature Should Be Studied On The University Level. ... Why Should People Study Books? Isn't It Rather Silly To Study Pride And Prejudice. Either You Get It Or You Don't.

I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

Lying Is An Elementary Means Of Self-defense.

Everything Should Be Understood, And Anything Can Be Transformed - That Is The Modern View.

The Aim Of All Commentary On Art Now Should Be To Make Works Of Art - And, By Analogy, Our Own Experience - More, Rather Than Less, Real To Us. The Function Of Criticism Should Be To Show How It Is What It Is, Even That It Is What It Is, Rather Than To Show What It Means.

Mad People = People Who Stand Alone And Burn. I'm Attracted To Them Because They Give Me Permission To Do The Same.

A Family's Photograph Album Is Generally About The Extended Family And, Often, Is All That Remains Of It.

What Seems Distinctively Modern As A Unit Of Thought, Of Art, Of Discourse Is The Fragment; And The Quotation Is One Kind Of Fragment.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

I Can't Say I Know How To Change The Society, But I Share The Feeling That This Society Is Full Of Technology Which Depersonalizes People, Which Seems To Drain A Sense Of Reality From Our Lives. It's Full Of A Lot Of Other Things Too.

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.

To Emphasize Style Is To Slight Content, Or To Introduce An Attitude Which Is Neutral With Respect To Content.

Victims Suggest Innocence. And Innocence, By The Inexorable Logic That Governs All Relational Terms, Suggests Guilt.

Perversity Is The Muse Of Modern Literature.

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.

The Question Of The Social Uses Of Photography Opens Out Into The Very Largest Issues Of The Self, Of The Relationship To Community, To Reality.

Writing Is A Little Door. Some Fantasies, Like Big Pieces Of Furniture, Won’t Come Through.

Enemies Are Somewhere Else, As The Fighting Is Almost Always “over There,” With Islamic Fundamentalism Now Replacing Russian And Chinese Communism As The Implacable, Furtive Menace. And “terrorist” Is A More Flexible Word Than “communist.” It Can Unify A Larger Number Of Quite Different Struggles And Interests. What This May Mean Is That The War Will Be Endless---since There Will Always Be Some Terrorism.

To Me, Literature Is A Calling, Even A Kind Of Salvation. It Connects Me With An Enterprise That Is Over 2,000 Years Old. What Do We Have From The Past? Art And Thought. That’s What Lasts. That’s What Continues To Feed People And Give Them An Idea Of Something Better.

I Didn't Think Of Myself As Importing, I Thought It Was More Interesting To Write About Things People Didn't Know About Than What They Did. When I Became Aware That I Was In Fact "importing", I Stopped Doing It.

The Writer Is Either A Practicing Recluse Or A Delinquent, Guilt-ridden One--or Both. Usually Both.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

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.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images — As, According To Proust, Most Ambitious Of Voluntary Prisoners, One Can't Possess The Present But One Can Possessthe Past.

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

The Work Of Art Itself Is . . . A Vibrant, Magical, And Exemplary Object Which Returns Us To The World In Some Way More Open And Enriched.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers.

We Fret About Words, We Writers. Words Mean. Words Point. They Are Arrows. Arrows Stuck In The Rough Hide Of Reality. And The More Portentous, More General The Word, The More They Can Also Resemble Rooms Or Tunnels. They Can Expand, Or Cave In. They Can Come To Be Filled With A Bad Smell. They Will Often Remind Us Of Other Rooms, Where We'd Rather Dwell Or Where We Think We Are Already Living. They Can Be Spaces We Lose The Art Or The Wisdom Of Inhabiting. And Eventually Those Volumes Of Mental Intention We No Longer Know How To Inhabit Will Be Abandoned, Boarded Up, Closed Down.

One Of The Author's Most Ancient Roles Is To Call The Community To Account For Its Hypocrisies And Bad Faith.

Knowing A Great Deal About What Is In The World Art, Catastrophe, The Beauties Of Nature Through Photographic Images, People Are Frequently Disappointed, Surprised, Unmoved When The See The Real Thing. For Photographic Images Tend To Subtract Feeling From Something We Experience At First Hand And The Feelings They Do Arouse Are, Largely, Not Those We Have In Real Life. Often Something Disturbs Us More In Photographed Form Than It Does When We Actually Experience It.

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.

Now The New Things Happening In France Don't Interest Me.

Gide And I Have Attained Such Perfect Intellectual Communion That I Experience The Appropriate Labor Pains For Every Thought He Gives Birth To!

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.

What I Expect From Writers-and From Myself As A Writer-is To Articulate A Complex View Of Things. To Incite Us To Be More Compassionate. To Orchestrate Our Mourning. And To Celebrate Ecstasy.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism -- Victimless Collecting, As It Were... In A World That Is Well On Its Way To Becoming One Vast Quarry, The Collector Becomes Someone Engaged In A Pious Work Of Salvage. 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.

Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution. Poignant Longings For Beauty, For An End To Probing Below The Surface, For A Redemption And Celebration Of The Body Of The World. Ultimately, Having An Experience Becomes Identical With Taking A Photograph Of It.

You Can Always Be Quoted.

Tragedy Is A Vision Of Nihilism, A Heroic Or Ennobling Vision Of Nihilism.

You Can Include Essay Elements In Fiction; This Is A Very Nineteenth Century Practice.

The Easiest Thing In The World For Me Is To Pay Attention.

Self-respect. It Would Make Me Lovable. And It's The Secret To Good Sex.

Al Forms Of Consensus About ''great'' Books And ''perennial'' Problems, Once Stabilized, Tend To Deteriorate Eventually Into Something Philistine. The Real Life Of The Mind Is Always At The Frontiers Of ''what Is Already Known.'' Those Great Books Don't Only Need Custodians And Transmitters. To Stay Alive, They Also Need Adversaries. The Most Interesting Ideas Are Heresies.

Communism Is Fascism With A Human Face.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World.

War-making Is One Of The Few Activities That People Are Not Supposed To View 'realistically'; That Is, With An Eye To Expense And Practical Outcome. In All-out War, Expenditure Is All-out, Unprudent – War Being Defined As An Emergency In Which No Sacrifice Is Excessive.

Anything In History Or Nature That Can Be Described As Changing Steadily Can Be Seen As Heading Toward Catastrophe.

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.

Strictly Speaking, It Is Doubtful That A Photograph Can Help Us Understand Anything.

In ‘life,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Work. In ‘work,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Life.

A Work Of Art, So Far As It Is A Work Of Art, Cannot - Whatever The Artist's Personal Intention - Advocate Anything At All.

I Urge You To Be As Impudent As You Dare. Be Bold, Be Bold, Be Bold.

Along With People Who Pretty Themselves For The Camera, The Unattractive And The Disaffected Have Been Assigned Their Beauty.

I Have Been Told That I Am A "natural" Feminist, Someone Who Was Born A Feminist. In Fact I Was Quite Blind To What The Problem Was: I Couldn't Understand Why Anyone Would Hesitate To Do What They Wanted To Do Just Because They Were Told That Women Didn't Do Such Things.

Sight Is A Promiscuous Sense. The Avid Gaze Always Wants More.

War Is Elective. It Is Not An Inevitable State Of Affairs. War Is Not The Weather.

The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives.

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.

Remember When You Hear Yourself Saying One Day That You Don't Have Time Anymore To Read Or Listen To Music Or Look At Paintings Or Go To The Movies Or Do Whatever Feeds Your Head Now. Then You're Getting Old. That Means They Got You, After All.

You Can Go Into All Sorts Of Situations With A Camera And People Will Think They Should Serve It.

Photographs Shock Insofar As They Show Something Novel.

Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response. Nothing Is More Decisive. There Is Taste In People, Visual Taste, Taste In Emotion - And There Is Taste In Acts, Taste In Morality. Intelligence, As Well, Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

I Want To Save My Soul, That Timid Wind.

I Write - And Talk - In Order To Find Out What I Think.

Surrealism Is A Bourgeois Disaffection; That Its Militants Thought It Universal Is Only One Of The Signs That It Is Typically Bourgeois.

Persons Who Merely Have-a-life Customarily Move In A Dense Fluid. That's How They're Able To Conduct Their Lives At All. Their Living Depends On Not Seeing.

My Idea Of A Writer: Someone Interested In Everything.

Whoever Invented Marriage Was An Ingenious Tormentor. It Is An Institution Committed To The Dulling Of The Feelings. The Whole Point Of Marriage Is Repetition. The Best It Aims For Is The Creation Of Strong, Mutual Dependencies.

I Make An Idol Of My Moral Consciousness. My Pursuit Of The Good Is Corrupted By The Sin Of Idolatry.

I Was Fascinated By Quotations And Lists. And Then I Noticed That Other People Were Fascinated By Quotations And Lists: People As Different As Borges And Walter Benjamin, Novalis And Godard.

Chris Marker Has A Brilliant Mind And Heart And Appetite For Life, And It's A Privilege To Travel With Him To Whatever He Chooses To Remember And To Evoke. He Is One Of Cinema's All Time Greats - The Most Important Reflective Or Non-narrative Filmmaker After Dziga Vertov.

Appetite For Life

Fear Binds People Together. And Fear Disperses Them. Courage Inspires Communities: The Courage Of An Example - For Courage Is As Contagious As Fear. But Courage, Certain Kinds Of Courage, Can Also Isolate The Brave.

In Ny Sensuality Completely Turns Into Sexuality - No Objects For The Senses To Respond To, No Beautiful River, Houses, People. Awful Smells Of The Street, And Dirt... Nothing Except Eating, If That, And The Frenzy Of The Bed.

It's Not 'natural' To Speak Well, Eloquently, In An Interesting, Articulate Way. People Living In Groups, Families, Communes Say Little - Have Few Verbal Means. Eloquence - Thinking In Words - Is A Byproduct Of Solitude, Deracination, A Heightened Painful Individuality. In Groups, It's More Natural To Sing, To Dance, To Pray: Given, Rather Than Invented (individual) Speech.

All Understanding Begins With Our Not Accepting The World As It Appears.

The Most Refined Form Of Sexual Attractiveness - As Well As The Most Refined Form Of Sexual Pleasure - Consists In Going Against The Grain Of One's Sex.

In Contrast To The Asexual Chasteness Of Official Communist Art , Nazi Art Is Both Prurient And Idealizing. A Utopian Aesthetics (physical Perfection; Identity As A Biological Given) Implies An Ideal Eroticism: Sexuality Converted Into The Magnetism Of Leaders And The Joy Of Followers. The Fascist Ideal Is To Transform Sexual Energy Into A "spiritual" Force, For The Benefit Of The Community.

Time Exists In Order That Everything Doesn’t Happen All At Once…and Space Exists So That It Doesn’t All Happen To You.

The Camera Can Be Lenient; It Is Can Also Expert At Being Cruel. But Its Cruelty Only Produces Another Kind Of Beauty, According To The Surrealist Preferences Which Rule Photographic Taste.

It's Not That You Make Up Your Ideas To Justify Your Temperament But That It's The Temperament First.

War Tears, Rends. War Rips Open, Eviscerates. War Scorches. War Dismembers. War Ruins.

Photography Is, First Of All, A Way Of Seeing.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

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.

America Was Founded On A Genocide, On The Unquestioned Assumption Of The Right Of White Europeans To Exterminate A Resident, Technologically Backward, Colored Population In Order To Take Over The Continent.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

I Have To Come Out Of The Closet Of The Third Person And Speak In A More Direct Way.

If Literature Has Engaged Me As A Project, First As A Reader, Then As A Writer, It Is As An Extension Of My Sympathies To Other Selves, Other Domains, Other Dreams, Other Territories.

The Principal Instances Of Mass Violence In The World Today Are Those Committed By Governments Within Their Own Legally Recognized Borders.

I Don't Write Easily Or Rapidly. My First Draft Usually Has Only A Few Elements Worth Keeping. I Have To Find What Those Are And Build From Them And Throw Out What Doesn't Work, Or What Simply Is Not Alive.

Some Of The Exuberance Of My Essay-writing Has Gone Because I'm Worried About The Uses They Could Serve.

Our Appreciations, It Was Felt, Could Be So Much More Inclusive If We Said That Something, Instead Of Being Beautiful, Was 'interesting'.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

Camp Is A Solvent Of Morality. It Neutralizes Moral Indignation, Sponsors Playfulness.

Moral Indignation

When We're Afraid We Shoot. But When We're Nostalgic We Take Pictures.

Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

Fatal Illness Has Always Been Viewed As A Test Of Moral Character, But In The Nineteenth Century There Is A Great Reluctance To Let Anybody Flunk The Test.

I Think Part Of The Success Which Structuralist Or Post-structuralist Thought In Critical Theory Has Had In Literary Studies In American Universities Is Due To A Theoretical Vacuum.

American Universities

Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.

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.

Time May Enhance What Seems Simply Dogged Or Lacking In Fantasy Now Because We Are Too Close To It, Because It Resembles Too Closely Our Own Everyday Fantasies, The Fantastic Nature Of Which We Don't Perceive. We Are Better Able To Enjoy A Fantasy As A Fantasy When It Is Not Our Own.

The Only Interesting Answers Are Those That Destroy The Questions.

We Live Under Continual Threat Of Two Equally Fearful, But Seemingly Opposed Destinies: Unremitting Banality And Inconceivable Terror. It Is Fantasy, Served Out In Large Rations By The Popular Arts, Which Allows Most People To Cope With These Twin Specters.

There Are Some Elements In Life - Above All, Sexual Pleasure - About Which It Isn't Necessary To Have A Position.

When You Are Writing, You Are - From Society's Point Of View - Only Producing The First Version Which Will Then Be Processed And Recycled.

As Industrialization Provided Social Uses For The Operations Of The Photographer, So The Reaction Against These Uses Reinforced The Self-consciousness Of Photography-as-art.

One Criticizes In Others What One Recognizes And Despises In Oneself. For Example, An Artist Who Is Revolted By Another’s Ambitiousness.

Jews And Homosexuals Are The Outstanding Creative Minorities In Contemporary Urban Culture. Creative, That Is, In The Truest Sense: They Are Creators Of Sensibilities. The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

Norman Mailer Records In His Recent Essays And Public Appearances His Perfecting Of Himself As A Virile Instrument Of Letters; He Is Perpetually In Training, Getting Ready To Launch Himself From His Own Missile Pad Into A High, Beautiful Orbit; Even His Failures May Yet Be Turned To Successes.

That Even An Apocalypse Can Be Made To Seem Part Of The Ordinary Horizon Of Expectation Constitutes An Unparalleled Violence That Is Being Done To Our Sense Of Reality, To Our Humanity.

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

This Is The Beauty That Emerges From Self-confidence, Class Confidence. That Says, I Am Not Born To Please. I Am Born To Be Pleased.

Self Confidence

Few Ever See What Is Not Already Inside Their Heads.

Finally, The Most Grandiose Result Of The Photographic Enterprise Is To Give Us The Sense That We Can Hold The Whole World In Our Heads – As An Anthology Of Images. To Collect Photographs Is To Collect The World

The Love Of The Famous, Like All Strong Passions, Is Quite Abstract. Its Intensity Can Be Measured Mathematically, And It Is Independent Of Persons.

A Great Writer Has All 4 - But You Can Still Be A Good Writer With Only 1 And 2.

You Have To Sink Way Down To A Level Of Hopelessness And Desperation To Find The Book That You Can Write.

Any Disease That Is Treated As A Mystery And Acutely Enough Feared Will Be Felt To Be Morally, If Not Literally, Contagious.

Growing Older Is Mainly An Ordeal Of The Imagination-a Moral Disease, A Social Pathology.

It's Beginnings That Are Hard. I Always Begin With A Great Sense Of Dread And Trepidation. Nietzsche Says That The Decision To Start Writing Is Like Leaping Into A Cold Lake.

The Two Ideas Are Antithetical. Insofar As Photography Is (or Should Be) About The World, The Photographer Counts For Little, But Insofar As It Is The Instrument Of Intrepid, Questioning Subjectivity, The Photographer Is All.

Existence Is No More Than The Precarious Attainment Of Relevance In An Intensely Mobile Flux Of Past, Present, And Future.

In Good Films, There Is Always A Directness That Entirely Frees Us From The Itch To Interpret.

And What Do I Mean By The Word 'perfection'? That I Shall Not Try To Explain But Only Say, 'perfection Makes Me Laugh.' Not Cynically, I Hasten To Add, 'with Joy.

Ours Is A Culture Based On Excess, On Overproduction; The Result Is A Steady Loss Of Sharpness In Our Sensory Experience. All The Conditions Of Modern Life - Its Material Plenitude, Its Sheer Crowdedness - Conjoin To Dull Our Sensory Faculties

A Personality Is Our Way Of Being For Others. We Hope That Others Will Meet Us Half Way Or More, Gratify Our Needs, Be Our Audience, Soothe Our Fears.

The Most Potent Elements In A Work Of Art Are, Often, Its Silences.

Using A Camera Appeases The Anxiety Which The Work-driven Feel About Not Working When They Are On Vacation And Supposed To Be Having Fun. They Have Something To Do That Is Like A Friendly Imitation Of Work: They Can Take Pictures.

A Thing Is A Thing, Not What Is Said Of That Thing.

I'm Interested In The Possibility Of Fiction Which Straddles Narrative And Essay.

The Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

Important Things

Wherever People Feel Safe — They Will Be Indifferent.

The Only Transformation That Interests Me Is A Total Transformation - However Minute

The Need For Truth Is Not Constant; No More Than Is The Need For Repose. An Idea Which Is A Distortion May Have A Greater Intellectual Thrust Than The Truth; It May Better Serve The Needs Of The Spirit, Which Vary. The Truth Is Balance, But The Opposite Of Truth, Which Is Unbalance, May Not Be A Lie.

Pornography Is One Of The Branches Of Literature - Science Fiction Is Another - Aiming At Disorientation, At Psychic Dislocation.

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.

A Photograph Comes Into Being, As It Is Seen, All At Once.

Volume Depends Precisely On The Writer's Having Been Able To Sit In A Room Every Day, Year After Year, Alone.

I Have Always Been Full Of Lust - As I Am Now - But I Have Always Been Placing Conceptual Obstacles In My Own Path.

Loeb Has Been Doing Wonderfully Patient Work, Exploring The American Conscience From The Inside. I Regard Him As Something Of A National Treasure.

Art Today Is A New Kind Of Instrument, An Instrument For Modifying Consciousness And Organizing New Modes Of Sensibility . . . . Artists Have Had To Become Self-conscious Aestheticians: Continually Challenging Their Means, Their Materials And Methods.

Aids Occupies Such A Large Part In Our Awareness Because Of What It Has Been Taken To Represent. It Seems The Very Model Of All The Catastrophes Privileged Populations Feel Await Them.

Intelligence Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

No 'we' Should Be Taken For Granted When The Subject Is Looking At Other People's Pain.

The Process Of Building A Self And Its Works Is Always Too Slow. One Is Always In Arrears To Oneself.

The History Of Art Is A Sequence Of Successful Transgressions.

It Is The Action Of Bodies On Bodies, Not Bodies On Minds, Which The Crowd Enjoys.

The Appetite For Thinking Must Be Regulated, As All Sensible People Know, For It May Stifle One's Life.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

Read A Lot. Expect Something Big, Something Exalting Or Deepening From A Book. No Book Is Worth Reading That Isn't Worth Re-reading.

Trending Author

Enrique Iglesias

Nicholas Negroponte

Karen Carpenter

Category