The Image-World, Susan Sontag
...technology has made photography an incomparable tool for deciphering behavior, predicting it, and interfering with it.
The Image-World, Susan Sontag Although a photograph may be said to record or show or present, it does not ever, properly speaking, "describe"; only language describes, which is an event in time.
Photographic Evangels, Susan Sontag Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance. In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge. Robert Frank was only being honest when he declared that "to produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation." If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. "A photograph is a secret about a secret," as Arbus observed. "The more it tells you the less you know."
The Heroism of Vision, Susan Sontag 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.
Melancholy Objects, Susan Sontag Americans feel the reality of their country to be so stupendous, and mutable, that it would be the rankest presumption to approach it in a classifying, scientific way. One could get at it indirectly, by subterfuge – breaking it off into strange fragments that could somehow, by synecdoche, be taken for the whole.
Melancholy Objects, Susan Sontag |
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