susan sontag quotes on photography

(pg. 573 quotes from Susan Sontag: 'My library is an archive of longings. 11). 1970) world. ‘To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a “good” picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune’. My overriding impression from Sontag and Barthes is a rather antipathetic view towards photography, which constantly dogs the literature. ‘Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”, “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made‘. Susan Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, and critic. (pg. ‘For Lange every portrait of another person is a ‘self-portrait’ of the photographer, as for Minor White – promoting ‘self-discovery through a camera’ – landscape photographs are really ‘inner landscapes‘. !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)? The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. Nevertheless, Sontag’s radical thoughts on photography are as potent as ever. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.”, “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. ‘Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that. (pg. I must take a photograph of it’. Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: ‘I find that ugly thing … beautiful‘. (pg 119). ‘Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow‘. ‘… like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. 6). All trademarks and registered designs on Yatesweb and Mick Yates Photography are the property of their owners. (pg. Documentarists (as distinct from courtiers with cameras) prefer the latter. Capitalist society requires a culture based on images. (pg. Find summaries for every chapter, including a On Photography Chapter Summary Chart to help you understand the book. (pg. (pg. (pg. ‘It cannot be a coincidence that just about the time that photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art, it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography entered, in force, into the museum‘. ‘The pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. ‘Stieglitz notes the undeniable influence of photography on painting, although he cites only the Impressionists – whose style of ‘blurred definition’ inspired his own‘. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects‘. Terms and conditions are here. 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. 155). 4). Reviewing Susan Sontag's book is analogous to printing in the darkroom. Susan Sontag’s essays on difficult European writers, avant-garde film, politics, photography, and the language of illness embodied the probing intellectual spirit of the 1960s. Both presuppose that photography provides a unique system of disclosures: that it shows us reality as we had not seen it before‘. ‘… 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 that said, there are many nuggets of wisdom, and, to follow my own logic, I need to both be cognisant of these views, and be prepared to counter the ones I do not agree with. And to have one’s judgement of an entire genre of work (atrocity photography) coloured solely by one’s childhood fears is, well, the work of an amateur. (pg. ‘To photograph is to confer importance. ‘All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. 51). 51 Copy quote. ‘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. ‘As Berenice Abbott writes: ‘The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past’. 178). 33). The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations, an unofficial reality behind the facade of bourgeois‘. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's, “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”, “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. Unless otherwise and specifically stated on the post, all items created by Mick Yates are licensed under the Creative Commons License scheme (requiring Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivative Works – 3.0 Unported) and may be redistributed according to that license. I will leave the reader to think of these what they may. Project Development, 1 Positions & Practice It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. 173). Even though Sontag later refuted many of her own ideas, the remains influential. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them‘. Of course, this modern day was the 1970's, but many of the key elements described in the collection of essays still remain relevant. One finds that there is beauty or at least interest in everything, seen with an acute enough eye. (pg. 5 Final Major Project, IC Critical Review I hope they inspire you. G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973) describes a more specialized collecting of photographs in the service of sexual obsession: photographs of car accidents which the narrator’s friend‘. ‘The most striking aspect of Arbus’s work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography’s most vigorous enterprises concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate, but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. (pg. (pg. — "About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings (1995), p. 109. 28). (pg. 173). ‘And no reality is exempt from appropriation, neither one that is scandalous (and should be corrected) nor one that is merely beautiful (or could be made so by the camera). ”, “But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. In the six essays included in the book, Susan Sontag explores the cultural, literary, historical and philosophical background of photography. ‘In much of conceptual art, in Christo’s packaging of the landscape, in the earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smith-son, the artist’s work is known principally by the photographic report of it in galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). For the most part, she describes the relationship between photography and capitalism in society. 58). ‘Strand and Weston, who both acknowledge a similarity between their ways of seeing and those of Kandinsky and Brancusi, may have been attracted to the hard edge of Cubist style in reaction to the softness of Stieglitz’s images‘ (pg. ‘In China, where no space is left over from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility, only some things are to be photographed and only in certain ways’. 14). (pg. ‘Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts. 54). (pg. (pg. (pg. Welcome back. Anyone interested in the social roles of photography will find this book fascinating and thought-provoking. (pg. ‘By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocationist abstraction. Images transfix. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions‘. I have thus decided to put them all in one place, for future reference. 100 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Susan Sontag That You Can’t Overlook Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects – unpremeditated slices of the world. ‘But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own‘. (pg. FMP Project Proposal “All photographs are memento mori. 129). It is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naive use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order‘. Susan Sontag — "Photographic Evangels", p. 147 As usual, when I am thinking of pursuing something, I turn to books. Books of photography pile higher and higher – measuring the lost past (hence, the promotion of amateur photography), taking the temperature of the present. Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them, The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations, an unofficial reality behind the facade of bourgeois, The FSA project, conceived as ‘pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems’ (Stryker’s words), was unabashedly propagandistic. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers), Kosmo Foto – 1970s Istanbul on a Pentax KX, https://observer.com/2014/12/to-do-friday-and-saturday-night-see-susan-sontag-documentary/, Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivative Works – 3.0 Unported. ‘Between the defense of photography as a superior means of self-expression and the praise of photography as a superior way of putting the self at reality’s service there is not as much difference as might appear. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”, “to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. ‘They kept a long, prudent distance from Surrealism’s contentious idea of blurring the lines between art and so-called life, between objects and events, between the intended and the unintentional, between pros and amateurs, between the noble and the tawdry, between craftsmanship and lucky blunders‘. Susan Sontag, NYC. ― Susan Sontag, On Photography. 68). 10). (pg. The fine arts assume that certain experiences or subjects have a meaning. To steel oneself against weakness. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. 409 likes. This is the theme stated so eloquently in the finest essay ever written in praise of photography, Paul Rosenfeld’s chapter on Stieglitz in Port of New York. Quotes from On Photography that I find particularly appropriate to my work are highlighted in colour. Quotations by Susan Sontag, American Author, Born January 16, 1933. 103). 147). Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. And a change in appearances is a change in the person, for he refused to posit any ‘real’ person ensconced behind these appearances‘. (pg. When we are afraid, we shoot. 1974. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography‘. (pg. (pg. 167). Susan Sontag. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. ‘In principle, photography executes the Surrealist mandate to adopt an uncompromisingly egalitarian attitude toward subject matter. Susan Sontag (/ ˈ s ɒ n t æ ɡ /; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. ‘J. Ideally, the photographer was able to make the two realities cognate, as illustrated by the title of an interview with Hine in 1920, Treating Labor Artistically‘. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers)‘. 85). “Photographs were seen as a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading.” ‘Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. (pg. 154). (pg. 'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); All images and posts created by Mick Yates are copyrighted. Susan Sontag — 1964 In The Evergreen Review, Dec. ... to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). tags: photography. ‘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‘. Social change is replaced by a change in images. ‘Some photographers set up as scientists, others as moralists. ‘A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights – to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. ‘Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, ‘awaiting the proper moment’ to take his celebrated picture, ‘Fifth Avenue, Winter‘. 90). As everything she wrote, Susan Sontag's book on photography is brilliant. (pg. FMP Final Submission, mick yates – portrait, events, documentary & street. The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive – the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be‘. (pg. 51). 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. (pg. Photographs furnish instant history, instant sociology, instant participation‘. (pg. ‘For Moholy-Nagy the genius of photography lies in its ability to render ‘an objective portrait: the individual to be photographed so that the photographic result shall not be encumbered with subjective intention‘. 69). 67). The scientists make an inventory of the world; the moralists concentrate on hard cases. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. ‘In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. 78). “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality... One can't possess reality, one can possess images- … Quite frankly, I am not a fan of Susan Sontag. IC Work in Progress, P&P Oral Presentation In this way, photography is an act of acquisition, not just interpretation or documentation. ‘The FSA project, conceived as ‘pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems’ (Stryker’s words), was unabashedly propagandistic, with Stryker coaching his team about the attitude they were to take toward their problem subject. ‘Two attitudes underlie this presumption that anything in the world is material for the camera. Please respect the copyright of all external materials, used for educational purposes only. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of … (pg. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. (pg. I applaud the fact that they ‘take a view’, rather than sitting on the sidelines. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‘picturesque’. The findings of Baudelaire’s flaneur are variously exemplified by the candid snapshots taken in the 1890s by Paul Martin in London streets and at the seaside and by Arnold Genthe in San Francisco’s Chinatown (both using a concealed camera), by Atget’s twilight Paris of shabby streets and decaying trades, by the dramas of sex and loneliness depicted in Brassai’s book Paris de nuit (1933), by the image of the city as a theater of disaster in Weegee’s Naked City (1945). I applaud the fact that they ‘take a view’, rather than sitting on the sidelines. ‘Photography reinforces a nominalist view of social reality as consisting of small units of an apparently infinite number …‘. 122). ‘Photography in Europe was largely guided by notions of the picturesque (i.e., the poor, the foreign, the time-worn), the important (i.e., the rich, the famous), and the beautiful. 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