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Photographs Trade Simultaneously On The Prestige Of Art And The Magic Of The Real.
-Susan Sontag
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Photographs Trade Simultaneously On

Susan Sontag
...
Photographs Trade Simultaneously On The Prestige Of Art And The Magic Of The Real.

Understanding the Quote: "photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of..."

This quote by Susan Sontag reflects deeply on the theme of photography. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Photography, Art, Real, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Susan Sontag interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag is celebrated for insightful thoughts on photography and art. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Photography
Art
Real
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How Boring Just To Be A Body.
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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.
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Courage Is Morally Neutral.
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.
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In The Journal I Do Not Just Express Myself More Openly Than I Could To Any Person; I Create Myself.
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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.
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[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.
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To Emphasize Style Is To Slight Content, Or To Introduce An Attitude Which Is Neutral With Respect To Content.
Attitude
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To Camp Is A Mode Of Seduction... Behind The 'straight' Public Sense In Which Something Can Be Taken, One Has Found A Private Zany Experience Of The Thing.
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The Principal Instances Of Mass Violence In The World Today Are Those Committed By Governments Within Their Own Legally Recognized Borders.
Government
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Books Are Not Only The Arbitrary Sum Of Our Dreams, And Our Memory. They Also Give Us The Model Of Self-transcende Nce.
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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.
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The Only Story That Seems Worth Writing Is A Cry, A Shot, A Scream. A Story Should Break The Reader's Heart.
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Cinema Is A Kind Of Pan-art. It Can Use, Incorporate, Engulf Virtually Any Other Art: The Novel, Poetry, Theater, Painting, Sculpture, Dance, Music, Architecture. Unlike Opera, Which Is A (virtually) Frozen Art Form, The Cinema Is And Has Been A Fruitfully Conservative Medium Of Ideas And Styles Of Emotions.
Movie
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It's A Pleasure To Share One's Memories. Everything Remembered Is Dear, Endearing, Touching, Precious. At Least The Past Is Safe Though We Didn't Know It At The Time. We Know It Now. Because It's In The Past; Because We Have Survived.
Memories
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There Is An Aggression Implicit In Every Use Of The Camera.
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We Live In A Culture In Which Intelligence Is Denied Relevance Altogether, In A Search For Radical Innocence, Or Is Defended As An Instrument Of Authority And Repression. In My View, The Only Intelligence Worth Defending Is Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying.
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There Is An Understandable Vindictiveness In People Who Come From Communist Countries. They Want To Keep Telling Us That We Were Fools To Think That We Could Make Radical Changes In Our Society. Though I Understand Their Dismay, Respect Their Suffering And Don't Understand The Gullibility Of Some People Who Don't Take In How Repressive These Societies Are, I Still Think It's Important To Keep People Of All Kinds As Active In Civic Matters As Possible.
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A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World.
Thinking
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All Great Art Contains At Its Center Contemplation, A Dynamic Contemplation.
Art
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Time Eventually Positions Most Photographs, Even The Most Amateurish, At The Level Of Art.
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Dissimulation, Secretiveness, Appear A Necessity To The Melancholic. He Has Complex, Often Veiled Relations With Others. These Feelings Of Superiority, Of Inadequacy, Of Baffled Feeling, Of Not Being Able To Get What One Wants, Or Even Name It Properly (or Consistently) To Oneself — These Can Be, It Is Felt They Ought To Be, Masked By Friendliness, Or The Most Scrupulous Manipulation.
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Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.
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All Possibility Of Understanding Is Rooted In The Ability To Say No.
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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.
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Literature Can Train, And Exercise, Our Ability To Weep For Those Who Are Not Us Or Ours.
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Today Is Such A Time, When The Project Of Interpretation Is Largely Reactionary, Stifling. Like The Fumes Of The Automobile And Of Heavy Industry Which Befoul The Urban Atmosphere, The Effusion Of Interpretations Of Art Today Poisons Our Sensibilities. In A Culture Whose Already Classical Dilemma Is The Hypertrophy Of The Intellect At The Expense Of Energy And Sensual Capability, Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art.
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We Are Ruled By Quotations.
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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.
Everyday
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A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World. That Means Trying To Understand, Take In, Connect With, What Wickedness Human Beings Are Capable Of; And Not Be Corrupted - Made Cynical, Superficial - By This Understanding.
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Photography
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In Photographing Dwarfs, You Don't Get Majesty & Beauty. You Get Dwarfs.
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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.
Hate
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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.
Past
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The Solution To A Problem - A Story That You Are Unable To Finish - Is The Problem. It Isn't As If The Problem Is One Thing And The Solution Something Else. The Problem, Properly Understood = The Solution. Instead Of Trying To Hide Or Efface What Limits The Story, Capitalize On That Very Limitation. State It, Rail Against It.
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The Love Of The Famous, Like All Strong Passions, Is Quite Abstract. Its Intensity Can Be Measured Mathematically, And It Is Independent Of Persons.
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In A Culture Whose Already Classical Dilemma Is The Hypertrophy Of The Intellect At The Expense Of Energy And Sensual Capability, Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art.
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Etymologically, 'patient' Means Sufferer.
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You Can Go Into All Sorts Of Situations With A Camera And People Will Think They Should Serve It.
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Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers. The Question Is What To Do With The Feelings That Have Been Aroused, The Knowledge That Has Been Communicated. People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown — If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens — Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.
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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.
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In Good Films, There Is Always A Directness That Entirely Frees Us From The Itch To Interpret.
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I Write Essays First Because I Have A Passionate Relationship To The Subject And Second Because The Subject Is One That People Are Not Talking About.
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Societies Need To Have One Illness Which Becomes Identified With Evil, And Attaches Blame To Its Victims.
Evil
Needs
Blame
The Life Of The Creative Man Is Lead, Directed And Controlled By Boredom. Avoiding Boredom Is One Of Our Most Important Purposes.
Creativity
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Literature Usually Begets Literature.
Literature
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American Energy. . . Is The Energy Of Violence, Of Free-floating Resentment And Anxiety Unleashed By Chronic Cultural Dislocations Which Must Be, For The Most Part, Ferociously Sublimated. This Energy Has Mainly Been Sublimated Into Crude Materialism
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Energy
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Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.
Writing
Thinking
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The Photograph Is Like A Quotation, Or A Maxim Or Proverb. Each Of Us Mentally Stocks Hundreds Of Photographs, Subject To Instant Recall.
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[on Marriage:] It Is An Institution Committed To The Dulling Of The Feelings.
Feelings
Institutions
Committed
Total Experiences, Of Which There Are Many Kinds, Tend Again And Again To Be Apprehended Only As Revivals Or Translations Of The Religious Imagination. To Try To Make A Fresh Way Of Talking At The Most Serious, Ardent, And Enthusiastic Level, Heading Off The Religious Encapsulation, Is One Of The Primary Intellectual Tasks Of Future Thought.
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There Is A Terrible, Mean American Resentment Toward A Writer Who Tries To Do Many Things.
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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.
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Waiting
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Self-exposure Is Commendable In Art Only When It Is Of A Quality And Complexity That Allows Other People To Learn About Themselves From It.
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The Freakish Is No Longer A Private Zone, Difficult Of Access. People Who Are Bizarre, In Sexual Disgrace, Emotionally Violent Areseen Daily On The Newsstands, On Tv, In The Subways. Hobbesian Man Roams The Streets, Quite Visible, With Glitter In His Hair.
Men
Hair
People
Our Very Sense Of Situation Is Now Articulated By The Camera's Interventions. The Omnipresence Of Cameras Persuasively Suggests That Time Consists Of Interesting Events, Events Worth Photographing. This, In Turn, Makes It Easy To Feel That Any Event, Once Underway, And Whatever Its Moral Character, Should Be Allowed To Complete Itself - So That Something Else Can Be Brought Into The World, The Photograph.
Character
Interesting
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The Last Sentence Of A Book Is, Of Course, Where You Have To Stop.
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Cities
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I Love To Read The Way People Love To Watch Television.
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Ambition, If It Feeds At All, Does So On The Ambition Of Others.
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Can I Love Someone...and Still Think/fly? Love Is Flying, Sown, Floating. Thought Is Solitary Flight, Beating Wings.
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You Know That You Can't Make References To The Classics Any Longer And Less And Less To The English Classics Even.
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People Tend To Become Cynical About Even The Most Appalling Crisis If It Seems To Be Dragging On, Failing To Come To Term.
People
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Conventions Vs. Spontaneity. This Is A Dialectical Choice, It Depends On The Assessment You Make Of Your Own Times. If You Judge That Your Own Time Is Ridden With Empty Insincere Formalities, You Plump For Spontaneity, For Indecorous Behavior Even...much Of Morality Is The Task Of Compensating For One's Age. One Assumes Unfashionable Virtues, In An Indecorous Time. In A Time Hollowed Out By Decorum, One Must School Oneself In Spontaneity.
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It Is Not Suffering As Such That Is Most Deeply Feared But Suffering That Degrades.
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The Single Most Amazing Phenomenon Is The Discrediting Of Idealism.
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Why Wouldn't You Write To Escape Yourself As Much As You Might Write To Express Yourself? It's Far More Interesting To Write About Others.
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Making Social Comment Is An Artificial Place For An Artist To Start From. If An Artist Is Touched By Some Social Condition, What The Artist Creates Will Reflect That, But You Can't Force It.
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One Task Of Literature Is To Formulate Questions And Construct Counterstatements To The Reigning Pieties. And Even When Art Is Not Oppositional, The Arts Gravitate Toward Contrariness. Literature Is Dialogue: Responsiveness. Literature Might Be Described As The History Of Human Responsiveness To What Is Alive And What Is Moribund As Cultures Evolve And Interact With One Another.
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Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.
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Simple
Self
The Likelihood That Your Acts Of Resistance Cannot Stop The Injustice Does Not Exempt You From Acting In What You Sincerely And Reflectively Hold To Be The Best Interests Of Your Community.
Inspirational
Change
Community
It Is The Action Of Bodies On Bodies, Not Bodies On Minds, Which The Crowd Enjoys.
Mind
Body
Crowds
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.
Cancer
Civilization
White
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.
Photography
Real
Painting
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.
Nature
Gun
People
The History Of Art Is A Sequence Of Successful Transgressions.
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Successful
Transgression
An Important Job Of The Critic Is To Savage What Is Mediocre Or Meretricious.
Jobs
Important
Savages
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Literature
Makers
Myth
Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.
Life Is
Photograph
Even More Than Comparing Society To A Family, Comparing It To A Body Makes An Authoritarian Ordering Of Society Seem Inevitable, Immutable.
Body
Compare
Inevitable
Where Once It Was The Physician Who Waged Bellum Contra Morbum, The War Against Disease, Now It's The Whole Society.
War
Health
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If Tragedy Is An Experience Of Hyperinvolvement, Comedy Is An Experience Of Underinvolvement, Of Detachment.
Tragedy
Comedy
Detachment
Volume Depends Precisely On The Writer's Having Been Able To Sit In A Room Every Day, Year After Year, Alone.
Powerful
Years
Able
Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.
Trying
Slums
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.
Travel
Fun
Vacation
What I Really Wanted Was Every Kind Of Life, And The Writer’s Life Seemed The Most Inclusive.
Kind
Wanted
The Western Memory Museum Is Now Mostly A Visual One.
Memories
Museums
Visuals
Transparence Is The Highest, Most Liberating Value In Art - And In Criticism - Today. Transparence Means Experiencing The Luminousness Of The Thing In Itself, Of Things Being What They Are.
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Criticism
Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.
Death
Dying
Unbearable
I Want To Live As Long As Possible, Just To See How Stupid It Gets.
Stupid
Long
Stupidity
The Only Transformation That Interests Me Is A Total Transformation - However Minute
Transformation
Minutes
Interest
Although None Of The Rules For Becoming More Alive Is Valid, It Is Healthy To Keep On Formulating Them.
Healthy
Alive
Becoming
The "happening" Operates By Creating An Asymmetrical Network Of Surprises, Without Climax Or Consummation, This Is The Alogism Of Dreams Rather Than The Logic Of Most Art.
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Art
Creating
A Photograph Comes Into Being, As It Is Seen, All At Once.
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Photograph
Never Worry About Being Obsessive. I Like Obsessive People. Obsessive People Make Great Art
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People
Worry
It Is Easier To Endure Than To Change. But Once One Has Changed, What Was Endured Is Hard To Recall.
Easier
Endure
Changed
On The Level Of Simple Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.
Simple
Making Love
Doe
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.
Order
White
America
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Photography
Art
Lying
The Ratio Of Authentic Literature To Trash In Pornography May Be Somewhat Lower Than The Ratio Of Novels Of Genuine Literary Meritto The Entire Volume Of Sub-literary Fiction Produced For Mass Taste. But It Is Probably Not Lower Than, For Instance, That Of Another Somewhat Shady Sub-genre With A Few First-rate Books To Its Credit, Science Fiction.
Book
Literature
May
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.
Real
World
Way
My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.
Skulls
Quotations
Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism
Ironic
Collecting
Quotations
The Writer Is Either A Practicing Recluse Or A Delinquent, Guilt-ridden One--or Both. Usually Both.
Inspiration
Writing
Guilt
Modern Discussions Of The Possibility Of Tragedy Are Not Exercises In Literary Analysis; They Are Exercises In Cultural Diagnostics, More Or Less Disguised.
Exercise
Tragedy
Analysis
I Don’t Care About Someone Being Intelligent; Any Situation Between People, When They Are Really Human With Each Other, Produces ‘intelligence.
Intelligent
People
Care
The Truth Of History Crowds Out The Truth Of Fiction - As If One Were Obliged To Choose Between Them.
History
Fiction
Crowds
I Don't Consider Devotion To The Past A Form Of Snobbery. Just One Of The More Disastrous Forms Of Unrequited Love.
Unrequited Love
Past
Devotion
Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon Art. Even More. It Is The Revenge Of The Intellect Upon The World. To Interpret Is To Impoverish, To Deplete The World -- In Order To Set Up A Shadow World Of ''meanings.''
Art
Revenge
Order
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.
People
Different
Lists
... The Place We Assign To Pornography Depends On The Goals We Set For Our Own Consciousness, Our Own Experience.
Goal
Consciousness
Pornography
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.
Spiritual
Art
Perfection
One Cannot Use The Life To Interpret The Work. But One Can Use The Work To Interpret The Life.
Use
Each Generation Has To Reinvent Spirituality.
Generations
Spirituality
I Have To Come Out Of The Closet Of The Third Person And Speak In A More Direct Way.
Way
Speak
Closets
Our Appreciations, It Was Felt, Could Be So Much More Inclusive If We Said That Something, Instead Of Being Beautiful, Was 'interesting'.
Beautiful
Appreciation
Interesting
Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.
Writing
Talking
Touching
Many Things In The World Have Not Been Named; And Many Things, Even If They Have Been Named, Have Never Been Described.
World
Has Beens
Ifs
Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures
Literature
World
Circulatory System
Life Is Not Significant Details, Illuminated By A Flash, Fixed Forever. Photographs Are.
Forever
Details
Life Is
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.
Ideas
Mold
Tools
Religion Is Probably, After Sex, The Second Oldest Resource Which Human Beings Have Available To Them For Blowing Their Minds.
Sex
Mind
Atheism
Ultimately Ideas Come Out Of A Temperament Or A Sensibility, They Are A Crystallization Or A Precipitation Of Temperament.
Ideas
Temperament
Sensibility
Most Of My Reading Is Rereading.
Reading
Rereading
Anthropology Has Always Struggled With An Intense, Fascinated Repulsion Towards Its Subject.... [the Anthropologist] Submits Himself To The Exotic To Confirm His Own Inner Alienation As An Urban Intellectual.
Intellectual
Exotic
Urban
The Feminist Movement Has Been Important To Me Because It's Made Me Feel Less Odd And Also Because It Has Made Me Understand Some Of The Pressures On Women Which I Was Lucky Enough To Have Escaped, Perhaps Because Of My Eccentricity Or The Oddness Of My Upbringing.
Feminist
Important
Lucky
That Tendency Of Social Thought To Generalize, To Describe A Leading Tendency In A Society In Such A Way That It Seems That Everything Falls Within Its Iron Laws, Is Very Common. Of Course Our Own Experience Tells Us That Life Is Not As Monochrome As These Thinkers Depict It. On The Other Hand They Are Very Valuable Because They Alert Us To Transformations We Are Likely To Take For Granted.
Fall
Hands
Law
Decline Of The Letter, The Rise Of The Notebook! One Doesn't Write To Others Any More; One Writes To Oneself.
Notebook
Writing
Letters
I'm Extremely Interested In The Russian Formalists And Have Been For Many Years. I'm More Drawn To Their Writing, Which Is Expressive And Literary, Than To Writing Which Is Extremely Academic Or Jargon-ridden.
Writing
Years
Jargon
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.
Gun
People
Cameras
You Can Always Be Quoted.
... One Of Art Photography's Most Vigorous Enterprises--[is] Concentrating On Victims, On The Unfortunate--but Without The Compassionate Purpose That Such A Project Is Expected To Serve.
Photography
Art
Purpose
I Do Not Think White America Is Committed To Granting Equality To The American Negro... This Is A Passionately Racist Country; It Will Continue To Be So In The Foreseeable Future.
Country
Equality
Thinking
Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.
Taste
Structure
Aesthetic
Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples. The World All In Couples, Each Couple In Its Own Little House, Watching Its Own Little Interests And Stewing In Its Own Little Privacy - It's The Most Repulsive Thing In The World. One's Got To Get Rid Of The Exclusiveness Of Married Love.
Love
Couple
Hunting
In ‘life,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Work. In ‘work,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Life.
Want
Superficial To Understand The Journal As Just A Receptable For One's Private, Secret Thoughts - Like A Confidante Who Is Deaf, Dumb, And Illiterate. In The Journal I Do Not Just Express Myself More Openly Than I Could To Any Person; I Create Myself. ... The Journal Is A Vehicle For My Sense Of Selfhood. It Represents Me As Emotionally And Spiritually Independent. Therefore (alas) It Does Not Simply Record My Actual, Daily Life But Rather - In Many Cases - Offers An Alternative To It.
Independent
Dumb
Secret
Loeb Has Been Doing Wonderfully Patient Work, Exploring The American Conscience From The Inside. I Regard Him As Something Of A National Treasure.
Treasure
Patient
Regard
The Culture-heroes Of Our Liberal Bourgeois Civilisation Are Ant-liberal And Ant-bourgeois . . .
Hero
Culture
Ants
To Paraphrase Several Sages: Nobody Can Think And Hit Someone At The Same Time.
Thinking
Sage
Paraphrase
Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. Or They Enlarge A Reality That Is Felt To Be Shrunk, Hollowed Out, Perishable, Remote. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images.
Photography
Reality
Way
Result Of Self-consciousness: Audience And Actor Are The Same. I Live My Life As A Spectacle For Myself, For My Own Edification. I Live My Life But I Don't Live In It. The Hoarding Instinct In Human Relations.
Self
Edification
Actors
We Are Told We Must Choose - The Old Or The New. In Fact, We Must Choose Both. What Is A Life If Not A Series Of Negotiations Between The Old And The New?
Choices
Understanding
Facts
To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.
Photography
Photograph
Importance
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.
Writing
Elements
Alive
A Work Of Art, So Far As It Is A Work Of Art, Cannot - Whatever The Artist's Personal Intention - Advocate Anything At All.
Art
Propaganda
Intention
The Young-old Polarization And The Male-female Polarization Are Perhaps The Two Leading Stereotypes That Imprison People.
Two
People
Males
The Best Emotions To Write Out Of Are Anger And Fear Or Dread. The Least Energizing Emotion To Write Out Of Is Admiration. It Is Very Difficult To Write Out Of Because The Basic Feeling That Goes With Admiration Is A Passive Contemplative Mood.
Art
Writing
Feelings
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.
Views
Mourning
Celebrate
To Us, The Difference Between The #‎ Photographer As An Individual Eye And The Photographer As An Objective Recorder Seems Fundamental, The Difference Often Regarded, Mistakenly, As Separating Photography As Art From #‎ Photography As Document. But Both Are Logical Extensions Of What Photography Means: Note-taking On, Potentially, Everything In The World, From Every Possible Angle.
Photography
Art
Mean
A Great Writer Has All 4 - But You Can Still Be A Good Writer With Only 1 And 2.
Writing
Great Writers
Stills
The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.
Photography
Photographer
Preserves
Photography Is, First Of All, A Way Of Seeing.
Photography
Way
Firsts
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.
Art
Past
Years
Some Of The Exuberance Of My Essay-writing Has Gone Because I'm Worried About The Uses They Could Serve.
Writing
Gone
Use
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.
Writing
Lakes
Decision
A Good Listener: A Physical Presence That Is Warm, Alert, Intelligent - More Important Than Any Words.
Intelligent
Listening
Important
Art Is A Form Of Consciousness.
Art
Consciousness
Form
War Is Elective. It Is Not An Inevitable State Of Affairs. War Is Not The Weather.
War
Weather
Affair
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.
Photography
World
Feels
To Be An Artist Or A Writer Is To Be This Weird Thing - A Hand Worker In An Era Of Mass Production.
Artist
Hands
Eras
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.
Successful
Self
Feelings
That's What A Community Is: Taking For Granted Certain Assumptions, Not Having To Start From Zero Every Time. This Is No Longer True.
Zero
Community
Assumption
We Live In A World Of Copies And We're Fascinated When We Encounter The Originals (in A Museum, For Instance).
Museums
Encounters
World
Our Task Is Not To Find The Maximum Amount Of Content In A Work Of Art, Mush Less To Squeeze More Content Out Of The Work Than Is Already There. Our Task Is To Cut Back On Content So We Can See The Thing At All. 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.
Art
Real
Cutting
Painters And Sculptors Under The Nazis Often Depicted The Nude, But They Were Forbidden To Show Any Bodily Imperfections. Their Nudes Look Like Pictures In Physique Magazines: Pinups Which Are Both Sanctimoniously Asexual And (in A Technical Sense) Pornographic, For They Have The Perfection Of A Fantasy.
Perfection
Looks
Magazines
Surrealism Is A Bourgeois Disaffection; That Its Militants Thought It Universal Is Only One Of The Signs That It Is Typically Bourgeois.
Surrealism
Universal
Bourgeois
[m]ilitary Metaphors Have More And More Come To Infuse All Aspects Of The Description Of The Medical Situation. Disease Is Seen As An Invasion Of Alien Organisms, To Which The Body Responds By Its Own Military Operations, Such As The Mobilizing Of Immunological "defenses", And Medicine Is "aggressive" As In The Language Of Most Chemotherapies.
Military
Health
Medicine
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.
Photography
Art
Self
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.
Beauty
Women
Citizens
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.
Powerful
Thinking
Finals
Cancer Is A Demonic Pregnancy.
Cancer
Pregnancy
Demonic
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.
People
Photograph
Subliminal
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.
Thinking
Vacuums
American Universities
Depression Is Melancholy Minus Its Charms - The Animation, The Fits.
Depression
Fit
Melancholy
A Thing Is A Thing, Not What Is Said Of That Thing.
Said
The Discovery Of The Good Taste Of Bad Taste Can Be Very Liberating. The Man Who Insists On High And Serious Pleasures Is Depriving Himself Of Pleasure; He Continually Restricts What He Can Enjoy; In The Constant Exercise Of His Good Taste He Will Eventually Price Himself Out Of The Market, So To Speak. Here Camp Taste Supervenes Upon Good Taste As A Daring And Witty Hedonism. It Makes The Man Of Good Taste Cheerful, Where Before He Ran The Risk Of Being Chronically Frustrated. It Is Good For The Digestion.
Witty
Exercise
Men
Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.
Writing
Mysterious
Activity
A Man Never Forgets His Body The Way A Woman Does, Because A Man Is Pushing His Body, A Part Of His Body, Forward, To Make The Act Of Love Happen. He Brings The Jut Of His Body Into The Act Of Love, Then Takes It Back, When It Has Had Its Way.
Men
Doe
Body
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.
Gun
Cameras
Murder
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.
Wall
Book
Emotional
In America, The Photographer Is Not Simply The Person Who Records The Past, But The One Who Invents It.
Photography
Past
America
The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.
Women
Reality
People
To Read Was Precisely To Enter Another World, Which Was Not The Reader's Own, And Come Back Refreshed, Ready To Bear With Equanimity The Injustices And Frustrations Of This One. Reading Was Balm, Amusement Not Incitement.
Reading
Frustration
World
The Moral Pleasure In Art, As Well As The Moral Service That Art Performs, Consists In The Intelligent Gratification Of Consciousness.
Art
Intelligent
Moral
I Guess I Think I'm Writing For People Who Are Smarter Than I Am, Because Then I'll Be Doing Something That's Worth Their Time. I'd Be Very Afraid To Write From A Position Where I Consciously Thought I Was Smarter Than Most Of My Readers.
Writing
Thinking
People
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.
Art
Secular Society
Tasks
Existence Is No More Than The Precarious Attainment Of Relevance In An Intensely Mobile Flux Of Past, Present, And Future.
Past
Flux
Existence
The Writer Must Be Four People: 1) The Nut, The Obsede 2) The Moron 3) The Stylist 4) The Critic. 1 Supplies The Material; 2 Lets It Come Out; 3 Is Taste; 4 Is Intelligence.
Nuts
People
Four
Writing Is A Little Door. Some Fantasies, Like Big Pieces Of Furniture, Won’t Come Through.
Writing
Doors
Pieces
People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown - If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens - Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling. The States Described As Apathy, Moral Or Emotional Anesthesia, Are Full Of Feelings; The Feelings Are Rage And Frustration.
Frustration
Emotional
People
The Creative Phase Of An Idea Coincides With The Period During Which It Insists, Cantankerously, On Its Boundaries, On What Makes It Different; But An Idea Becomes False And Impotent When It Seeks Reconciliation, At Cut-rate Prices, With Other Ideas.
Cutting
Ideas
Creative
Writing Is Finally A Series Of Permissions You Give Yourself To Be Expressive In Certain Ways. To Leap. To Fly. To Fail.
Writing
Giving
Way
Taste Has No System And No Proofs.
Taste
Proof
Photographed Images Do Not Seem To Be Statements About The World So Much As Pieces Of It, Miniatures Of Reality That Anyone Can Make Or Acquire
Reality
Pieces
World
One Could Plausibly Argue That It Is For Quite Sound Reasons That The Whole Capacity For Sexual Ecstasy Is Inaccessible To Most People - Given That Sexuality Is Something, Like Nuclear Energy, Which May Prove Amenable To Domestication Through Scruple, But Then Again May Not.
People
May
Energy
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