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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.

-Susan Sontag

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Using A Camera Appeases

Susan Sontag

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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.

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While A Painting, Even One That Meets Photographic Standards Of Resemblance, Is Never More Than The Stating Of An Interpretation, A Photograph Is Never Less Than The Registering Of An Emanation (light Waves Reflected By Objects) — A Material Vestige Of Its Subject In A Way That No Painting Can Be.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.

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

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.

The Unit Of The Poet Is The Word, The Unit Of The Prose Writer Is The Sentence.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Basic Unit For Contemporary Art Is Not The Idea, But The Analysis Of And Extension Of Sensations.

Nobody Ever Discovered Ugliness Through Photographs. But Many, Through Photographs, Have Discovered Beauty.

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

World Suffering

Surrealism In Painting Amounted To Little More Than The Contents Of A Meagerly Stocked Dream World: A Few Witty Fantasies, Mostly Wet Dreams And Agoraphobic Nightmares.

The Ideology Of Capitalism Makes Us All Into Connoisseurs Of Liberty - Of The Indefinite Expansion Of Possibility.

Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.

Silence Remains, Inescapably, A Form Of Speech.

Literature Usually Begets Literature.

Illnesses Have Always Been Used As Metaphors To Enliven Charges That A Society Was Corrupt Or Unjust.

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.

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

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.

There Is A Great Deal That Either Has To Be Given Up Or Be Taken Away From You If You Are Going To Succeed In Writing A Body Of Work.

To Take A Photograph Is To Participate In Another Person's Mortality, Vulnerability, Mutability. Precisely By Slicing Out This Moment And Freezing It, All Photographs Testify To Time's Relentless Melt.

The "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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Traditional Metaphor For A Spiritual Investigation Is That Of The Voyage Or The Journey. From This Image I Must Dissociate Myself. I Do Not Consider Myself A Voyager, I Have Preferred To Stand Still.

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

My Own View Is That One Cannot Be Religious In General Any More Than One Can Speak Language In General; At Any Given Moment One Speaks French Or English Or Swahili Or Japanese, But Not 'language.

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.

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

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

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.

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

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.

Photographs May Be More Memorable Than Moving Images, Because They Are A Neat Slice Of Time, Not A Flow. Each Still Photograph Is A Privileged Moment Turned Into A Slim Object That One Can Keep And Look At Again.

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.

But When We Are Nostalgic, We Take Pictures

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

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.

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.

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.

We Live In A World Of Copies And We're Fascinated When We Encounter The Originals (in A Museum, For Instance).

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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

Everything Has Changed And Nothing Is Changed.

Things Have Changed

One Can Never Ask Anyone To Change A Feeling.

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.

It's Hard Not To Be Afraid. Be Less Afraid.

Funny Graduation

One Doesn't Need To Know The Artist's Private Intentions. The Work Tells All.

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

The Photographer's Intentions Do Not Determine The Meaning Of A Photograph, Which Will Have Its Own Career, Blown By The Whims And Loyalties Of The Diverse Communities That Have Use For It.

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.

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

What Is The Most Beautiful In Virile Men Is Something Feminine; What Is Most Beautiful In Feminine Women Is Something Masculine.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

[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.

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.

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.

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead. Pay Attention. It's All About Paying Attention. Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

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.

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

Keeping A Journal

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.

Never Worry About Being Obsessive. I Like Obsessive People. Obsessive People Make Great Art

Travel Becomes A Strategy For Accumulating Photographs.

'camp' Is A Vision Of The World In Terms Of Style - But A Particular Style. It Is The Love Of The Exaggerated.

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

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.

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.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, Parliamentary Government, Baroque Churches, Newton, The Emancipation Of Women, Kant, Balanchine Ballets, Et Al. Don’t Redeem What This Particular Civilization Has Wrought Upon The World. The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

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

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.

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

One Cannot Use The Life To Interpret The Work. But One Can Use The Work To Interpret The Life.

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

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.

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.

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.

It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling.

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

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

The Notion Of Art As The Dearly Purchased Outcome Of An Immense Spiritual Risk, One Whose Cost Goes Up With The Entry And Participation Of Each New Player In The Game.

The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

The Writers Or Artists I Write About Are Not Necessarily Those I Care Most About (shakespeare Is Still My Favourite Writer) But Those Whose Work I Feel Has Been Neglected.

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

Whatever Doesn't Kill You Leaves Scars.

Photographs Shock Insofar As They Show Something Novel.

With More People, There Are More Voices To Tune Out.

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.

I Haven't Been Everywhere, But It's On My List.

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.

Interpretation Is The Revenge Of The Intellectual Upon Art.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I Don't Want To Express Alienation. It Isn't What I Feel. I'm Interested In Various Kinds Of Passionate Engagement. All My Work Says Be Serious, Be Passionate, Wake Up.

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.

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.

What Pornographic Literature Does Is Precisely To Drive A Wedge Between One's Existence As A Sexual Being - While In Ordinary Life A Healthy Person Is One Who Prevents Such A Gap From Opening Up

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

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

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

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 Highest Vocation Of Photography Is To Explain Man To Man.

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.

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

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

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.

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

All Struggle, All Resistance Is -- Must Be -- Concrete. And All Struggle Has A Global Resonance. If Not Here, Then There. If Not Now, Then Soon. Elsewhere As Well As Here.

To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

Photographs Furnish Evidence. Something We Hear About, But Doubt, Seems Proven When We're Shown A Photograph Of It.

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.

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives. Cancerphobia Taught Us The Fear Of A Polluting Environment; Now We Have The Fear Of Polluting People That Aids Anxiety Inevitably Communicates. Fear Of The Communion Cup, Fear Of Surgery: Fear Of Contaminated Blood, Whether Christ's Blood Or Your Neighbor's.

What We Need Is To Use What We Have.

Use It Or Lose It

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.

All Possibility Of Understanding Is Rooted In The Ability To Say No.

Art Is Seduction, Not Rape.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

Many Things In The World Have Not Been Named; And Many Things, Even If They Have Been Named, Have Never Been Described.

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The Public Voice In The Theater Today Is Crude And Raucous, And, All Too Often, Weak-minded.

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.

The Shock Of Photographed Atrocities Wears Off With Repeated Viewings, Just As The Surprise And Bemusement Felt The First Time One Sees A Pornographic Movie Wear Off After One Sees A Few More.

Ideas Disturb The Levelness Of Life

The Photograph Is Like A Quotation, Or A Maxim Or Proverb. Each Of Us Mentally Stocks Hundreds Of Photographs, Subject To Instant Recall.

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

The Writer's First Job Is Not To Have Opinions But To Tell The Truth... And Refuse To Be An Accomplice Of Lies And Misinformation. Literature Is The House Of Nuance And Contrariness Against The Voices Of Simplification.

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

To Make Your Life Being A Writer, It's An Auto-slavery ... You Are Both The Slave And The Task-master.

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.

A Photograph Passes For Incontrovertible Proof That A Given Thing Happened. The Picture May Distort; But There Is Always A Presumption That Something Exists, Or Did Exist, Which Is Like What’s In The Picture

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

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

Physical Beauty

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

One Can Know Worlds One Has Not Experienced, Choose A Response To Life That Has Never Been Offered, Create An Inwardness Utterly Strong And Fruitful.

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?

The Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

Important Things

Desire Has No History.

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.

Photographs Objectify: They Turn An Event Or A Person Into Something That Can Be Possessed.

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

The Unanimously Applauded, Self-congratulatory Bromides Of A Soviet Party Congress Seemed Contemptible. The Unanimity Of The Sanctimonious, Reality-concealing Rhetoric Spouted By American Officials And Media Commentators In Recent Days Seems, Well, Unworthy Of A Mature Democracy.

Sanity Is A Cozy Lie.

I Don't Consider Devotion To The Past A Form Of Snobbery. Just One Of The More Disastrous Forms Of Unrequited Love.

Unrequited Love

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.

When Comedy Fails, Seriousness Begins To Leak Back In.

Communism Is Fascism With A Human Face.

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.

The Point Is To Get A Good Rhythm, To Make It Mindless, Almost As A Daydream. To Walk Like Breathing. To Make It What The Body Wants, What The Air Wants, What Time Wants.

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.

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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