"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precis...

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












Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
More Susan Sontag quotes
"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subje...
"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography ...
"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 ...
"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
"Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.
"The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic...
"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
"It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.
"Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
"Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.
"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 p...
"The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
"But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be cal...
"To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ab...