Background Image

...

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.

-Susan Sontag

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Quality Of American

Susan Sontag

...

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.

Views: 7

Topic

More From Susan Sontag

The Purpose Of Art Is Always, Ultimately, To Give Pleasure - Though Our Sensibilities May Take Time To Catch Up With The Forms Of Pleasure That Art In A Given Time May Offer.

The Romantic Treatment Of Death Asserts That People Were Made Singular, Made More Interesting, By Their Illnesses.

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.

I Don't Write Because There's An Audience. I Write Because There Is Literature.

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.

My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.

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.

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.

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

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

Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick. Although We All Prefer To Use Only The Good Passport, Sooner Or Later Each Of Us Is Obliged, At Least For A Spell, To Identify Ourselves As Citizens Of That Other Place.

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.

The Truth Of History Crowds Out The Truth Of Fiction - As If One Were Obliged To Choose Between Them.

The Fear Of Aids Imposes On An Act Whose Ideal Is An Experience Of Pure Presentness (and A Creation Of The Future) A Relation To The Past To Be Ignored At One's Peril. Sex No Longer Withdraws Its Partners, If Only For A Moment, From The Social. It Cannot Be Considered Just A Coupling; It Is A Chain, A Chain Of Transmission, From The Past.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Truth Is Always Something That Is Told, Not Something That Is Known. If There Were No Speaking Or Writing, There Would Be No Truth About Anything. There Would Only Be What Is.

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.

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.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

... Liberal Intellectualstend To Have A Classical Theory Of Politics, In Which The State Has A Monopoly Of Power; Hoping Thatthose In Positions Of Authority May Prove To Be Enlightened Men, Wielding Power Justly, They Are Natural, If Cautious, Allies Of The "establishment.

Art Is A Form Of Consciousness.

The Hard Truth Is That What May Be Acceptable In Elite Culture May Not Be Acceptable In Mass Culture, That Tastes Which Pose Only Innocent Ethical Issues As The Property Of A Minority Become Corrupting When They Become More Established. Taste Is Context, And The Context Has Changed.

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.

But I Cannot Forgive Those Who Did Not Care About More Than Their Own Glory Or Well-being. They Thought They Were Civilized. They Were Despicable. Damn Them All.

Can I Love Someone...and Still Think/fly? Love Is Flying, Sown, Floating. Thought Is Solitary Flight, Beating Wings.

As Photographs Give People An Imaginary Possession Of A Past That Is Unreal, They Also Help People To Take Possession Of Space In Which They Are Insecure.

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

To Paraphrase Several Sages: Nobody Can Think And Hit Someone At The Same Time.

It Seems Positively Unnatural To Travel Without Taking A Camera Along... The Very Activity Of Taking Pictures Is Soothing And Assuages General Feelings Of Disorientation That Are Likely To Be Exacerbated By Travel.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

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.

Cancer Patients Are Lied To, Not Just Because The Disease Is (or Is Thought To Be) A Death Sentence, But Because It Is Felt To Be Obscene - In The Original Meaning Of That Word: Ill-omened, Abominable, Repugnant To The Senses.

What Makes Me Feel Strong? Being In Love And Work. I Must Work.

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

World Suffering

Passion Paralyzes Good Taste.

It Is Not Altogether Wrong To Say That There Is No Such Thing As A Bad Photograph - Only Less Interesting, Less Relevant, Less Mysterious Ones.

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.

I Feel Inauthentic At A Party. ... Going To A Party Is A 'low' Activity - The Authentic Self Is Compromised, Fragmented - One Plays 'roles.' One Isn't Fully Present, Beyond Role-playing. One Doesn't (can't) Tell The Full Truth, Which Means One Is Lying, Even If One Doesn't Literally Tell Lies.

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

Although There Is A Sense In Which The Camera Does Indeed Capture Reality, Not Just Interpret It, Photographs Are As Much An Interpretation Of The World As Paintings And Drawings Are

What Pornography Is Really About, Ultimately, Isn't Sex But Death.

Interpretation, Based On The Highly Dubious Theory That A Work Of Art Is Composed Of Items Of Content, Violates Art. It Makes Art Into An Article For Use, For Arrangement Into A Mental Scheme Of Categories.

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

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.

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

Camp Is Art That Proposes Itself Seriously, But Cannot Be Taken Altogether Seriously Because It Is 'too Much.

Photographs Alter And Enlarge Our Notions Of What Is Worth Looking At And What We Have A Right To Observe. They Are A Grammar And, Even More Importantly, An Ethics Of Seeing.

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

The Taste For Quotations (and For The Juxtaposition Of Incongruous Quotations) Is A Surrealist Taste.

Theories That Diseases Are Caused By Mental States And Can Be Cured By Will Power, Are Always An Index Of How Much Is Not Understood About The Physical Terrain Of A Disease.

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

In The Journal I Do Not Just Express Myself More Openly Than I Could To Any Person; I Create Myself.

Keeping A Journal

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

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

Modern Discussions Of The Possibility Of Tragedy Are Not Exercises In Literary Analysis; They Are Exercises In Cultural Diagnostics, More Or Less Disguised.

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.

I Was Enthralled And Moved By Azar Nafisi's Account Of How She Defied, And Helped Others To Defy, Radical Islam's War Against Women. Her Memoir Contains Important And Properly Complex Reflections About The Ravages Of Theocracy, About Thoughtfulness, And About The Ordeals Of Freedom-as Well As A Stirring Account Of The Pleasures And Deepening Of Consciousness That Result From An Encounter With Great Literature And With An Inspired Teacher.

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.

... The Place We Assign To Pornography Depends On The Goals We Set For Our Own Consciousness, Our Own Experience.

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.

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

Each Of Us Carries A Room Within Ourselves, Waiting To Be Furnished And Peopled, And If You Listen Closely, You May Need To Silence Everything In Your Own Room, You Can Hear The Sounds Of That Other Room Inside Your Head.

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

Death Is Unbearable Unless You Can Get Beyond The I.

Decline Of The Letter, The Rise Of The Notebook! One Doesn't Write To Others Any More; One Writes To Oneself.

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.

[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.

Mallarme Said That Everything In The World Exists In Order To End In A Book. Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

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.

God, Living Is Enormous!

I'm More Cautious About What I Write.

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.

I Was Not Looking For My Dreams To Interpret My Life, But Rather For My Life To Interpret My Dreams.

Follow Your Dreams

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.

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

The Only Story That Seems Worth Writing Is A Cry, A Shot, A Scream. A Story Should Break The Reader's Heart.

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

In Contrast To The Written Account-which, Depending On Its Complexity Of Thought, Reference, And Vocabulary, Is Pitched At A Larger Or Smaller Readership-a Photograph Has Only One Language And Is Destined Potentially For All.

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.

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

There Is A Terrible, Mean American Resentment Toward A Writer Who Tries To Do Many Things.

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

Fewer And Fewer Americans Possess Objects That Have A Patina, Old Furniture, Grandparents Pots And Pans - The Used Things, Warm With Generations Of Human Touch, Essential To A Human Landscape. Instead, We Have Our Paper Phantoms, Transistorized Landscapes. A Featherweight Portable Museum.

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.

[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.

Ideas Disturb The Levelness Of Life

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.

Like The Effects Of Industrial Pollution And The New System Of Global Financial Markets, The Aids Crisis Is Evidence Of A World In Which Nothing Important Is Regional, Local, Limited; In Which Everything That Can Circulate Does, And Every Problem Is, Or Is Destined To Become, Worldwide.

To The Militant, Identity Is Everything.

It Hurts To Love. It's Like Giving Yourself To Be Flayed And Knowing That At Any Moment The Other Person May Just Walk Off With Your Skin.

The Idea Of Content In Art Is Today Merely A Hindrance, A Nuisance, A Subtle Or Not So Subtle Philistinism.

When Something Is Just Bad, It's Often Because It Is Too Mediocre In Its Ambition. The Artist Hasn't Attempted To Do Anything Really Outlandish.

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

You Can Always Be Quoted.

To Be An Artist Or A Writer Is To Be This Weird Thing - A Hand Worker In An Era Of Mass Production.

How Boring Just To Be A Body.

My Urge To Write Is An Urge Not To Self-expressionism But To Self-transcendence. My Work Is Both Bigger And Smaller Than I Am.

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

What I Really Wanted Was Every Kind Of Life, And The Writer’s Life Seemed The Most Inclusive.

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

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

Photography Is An Elegiac Art, A Twilight Art. Most Subjects Photographed Are, Just By Virtue Of Being Photographed, Touched With Pathos.

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.

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable.

Physical Beauty

Pornography Is A Theatre Of Types, Never Of Individuals.

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.

The Particular Qualities And Intentions Of Photographs Tend To Be Swallowed Up In The Generalized Pathos Of Time Past.

The Only Ideals Allowed Are Healthy Ones - Those Everyone May Aspire To, Or Comfortably Imagine Oneself Possessing.

Instead Of Just Recording Reality, Photographs Have Become The Norm For The Way Things Appear To Us, Thereby Changing The Very Idea Of Reality And Of Realism.

Being In Love Means Being Willing To Ruin Yourself For The Other Person.

I Believe That Courage Is Morally Neutral. I Can Well Imagine Wicked People Being Brave And Good People Being Timid Or Afraid. I Don't Consider It A Moral Virtue.

The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

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.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart. It Enlarges Your Sense Of Human Possibility What Human Nature Is Of What Happens In The World. It's A Creator Of Inwardness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

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.

A Large Part Of The Popularity And Persuasiveness Of Psychology Comes From Its Being A Sublimated Spiritualism: A Secular, Ostensibly Scientific Way Of Affirming The Primacy Of "spirit" Over Matter.

Any Photograph Has Multiple Meanings: Indeed, To See Something In The Form Of A Photograph Is To Encounter A Potential Object Of Fascination. 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.’ Photographs, Which Cannot Themselves Explain Anything, Are Inexhaustible Invitations To Deduction, Speculation, And Fantasy

What Interests Me Is To Understand The Nature Of The Modern.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

Most Of My Reading Is Rereading.

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

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.

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

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

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.

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.

Literature Was The Passport To Enter A Larger Life; That Is, The Zone Of Freedom. Literature Was Freedom. Especially In A Time In Which The Values Of Reading And Inwardness Are So Strenuously Challenged, Literature Is Freedom.

An Important Job Of The Critic Is To Savage What Is Mediocre Or Meretricious.

A Fiction About Soft Or Easy Deaths Is Part Of The Mythology Of Most Diseases That Are Not Considered Shameful Or Demeaning.

10 Percent Of Any Population Is Cruel, No Matter What, And 10 Percent Is Merciful, No Matter What, And The Remaining 80 Percent Can Be Moved In Either Direction.

The Highest Vocation Of Photography Is To Explain Man To Man.

Art Is Not Only About Something; It Is Something. A Work Of Art Is A Thing In The World, Not Just A Text Or Commentary On The World.

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.

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.

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

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

The Taste For Worst-case Scenarios Reflects The Need To Master Fear Of What Is Felt To Be Uncontrollable. It Also Expresses An Imaginative Complicity With Disaster.

Worst Case Scenario

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.

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

Images Anesthetize. An Event Known Through Photographs Certainly Becomes More Real Than It Would Have Been If One Had Never Seen The Photographs ... But After Repeated Exposure To Images It Also Becomes Less Real. ... 'concerned' Photography Has Done At Least As Much To Deaden Conscience As To Arouse It.

To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

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

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

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.

With The Modern Diseases (once Tb, Now Cancer) The Romantic Idea That The Disease Expresses The Character Is Invariably Extended To Assert That The Character Causes The Disease -- Because It Has Not Expressed Itself. Passion Moves Inward, Striking And Blighting The Deepest Cellular Recesses.

Reality Has Come To Seem More And More Like What We Are Shown By Cameras.

Again: There Is Nothing Inherently Superior About Resistance. All Our Claims For The Righteousness Of Resistance Rest On The Rightness Of The Claim That The Resisters Are Acting In The Name Of Justice. And The Justice Of The Cause Does Not Depend On, And Is Not Enhanced By, The Virtue Of Those Who Make The Assertion. It Depends First And Last On The Truth Of A Description Of A State Of Affairs That Is, Truly, Unjust And Unnecessary.

Like The Collector, The Photographer Is Animated By A Passion That, Even When It Appears To Be For The Present, Is Linked To A Sense Of The Past.

I'm Only Interested In People Engaged In A Project Of Self-transformation.

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

In The Final Analysis, Style Is Art. And Art Is Nothing More Or Less Than Various Modes Of Stylized, Dehumanized Representation.

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.

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

Literature Can Train, And Exercise, Our Ability To Weep For Those Who Are Not Us Or Ours.

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

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.

There Is An Aggression Implicit In Every Use Of The Camera.

The Decline Of Education In North America And I Suppose In Western Europe Makes It Harder To Have A Common Body Of References.

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

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

Photography - The Supreme Form Of Travel, Of Tourism - Is The Principal Modern Means For Enlarging The World. As A Branch Of Art, Photography's Enterprise Of World Enlargement Tends To Specialize In The Subjects Felt To Be Challenging, Transgressive. A Photograph May Be Telling Us: This Too Exists. And That. And That. (and It Is All 'human.') But What Are We To Do With This Knowledge - If Indeed It Is Knowledge, About, Say, The Self, About Abnormality, About Ostracized Or Clandestine Worlds?

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

Creativity Needs To Be Taken Care Of. It's Like A Big Baby That Needs To Be Nourished.

Most Men Experience Getting Older With Regret, Apprehension. But Most Women Experience It Even More Painfully: With Shame. Aging Is A Man's Destiny, Something That Must Happen Because He Is A Human Being. For A Woman, Aging Is Not Only Her Destiny . . . It Is Also Her Vulnerability.

The Fear Of Becoming Old Is Born Of The Recognition That One Is Not Living Now The Life That One Wishes.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Everyone Who Lives In An Industrialized Society Is Obliged Gradually To Give Up The Past, But In Certain Countries, Such As The United States And Japan, The Break With The Past Has Been Particularly Traumatic.

The Fantasies Inspired By Tb In The Last Century, By Cancer Now, Are Responses To A Disease Thought To Be Intractable And Capricious--that Is, A Disease Not Understood--in An Era In Which Medicine's Central Premise Is That All Diseases Can Be Cured.

The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.

I Want To Be Able To Be Alone, To Find It Nourishing - Not Just A Waiting.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

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.

The Moral Pleasure In Art, As Well As The Moral Service That Art Performs, Consists In The Intelligent Gratification Of Consciousness.

But When We Are Nostalgic, We Take Pictures

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

Silence Remains, Inescapably, A Form Of Speech.

The Felt Unreliability Of Human Experience Brought About By The Inhuman Acceleration Of Historical Change Has Led Every Sensitive Modern Mind To The Recording Of Some Kind Of Nausea, Of Intellectual Vertigo.

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

Time Eventually Positions Most Photographs, Even The Most Amateurish, At The Level Of Art.

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.

I Like To Feel Dumb. That’s How I Know There’s More In The World Than Me.

Each Generation Has To Reinvent Spirituality.

Trending Author

Lady Bird Johnson

Mike Singletary

Arianna Huffington

Robert Motherwell

Category