A Quote by Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

About Acquire Anyone Images Make Miniatures Much Photographed Pieces Reality Seem Statements World

Quote Author

Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.

Naum Gabo

Shamanism is a path of knowledge, not of faith, and that knowledge cannot come from me or anyone else in this reality. To acquire that knowledge, including the knowledge of the reality of the spirits, it is necessary to step through the shaman's doorway and acquire empirical evidence.

Michael Harner

Reality cannot be photographed or represented. We can only create a new reality. And my dilemma is how to make art out of a reality that most of us would rather ignore. How do you make art when the world is in such a state? My answer has been to make mistakes, but when I can, to choose them. We are all guilt victims choosing mistakes, and as Godard said, the very definition of the human condition is in the mise-en-scéne itself.

Alfredo Jaar

I am myself a professional creator of images, a film-maker. And then there are the images made by the artists I collect, and I have noticed that the images I create are not so very different from theirs. Such images seem to suggest how I feel about being here, on this planet. And maybe that is why it is so exciting to live with images created by other people, images that either conflict with one's own or demonstrate similarities to them.

Thomas Koerfer

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. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Susan Sontag

To a normal person, $10 million will seem like enough. But anyone who thinks that's enough is not the type that can acquire that much in the first place.

James K. Glassman

I thought fashion was just the pretext to do images with lots of freedom and get them published in magazines. You could express your point of view, make statements about women and about what you believe in.

Peter Lindbergh

Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it.

Michael Schudson

MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.

Tina Fey

One of the big problems in this field is that there's so much mystification that surrounds talk of the Shari'a, whether its saying that Islam is all about peace or whether its people saying that Islam is all about Jihad and all about suicide bombs. People will make statements which don't seem to be backed up by any sort of historical context.

Sadakat Kadri

Computer images, like camera images today, will be seen as representations of a simulated, second-degree reality with little or no connection to the unmediated world. This is one lesson we can learn from photographs, and especially from those of the last 25 years: images exist not to be believed, but to be interrogated.

Andy Grundberg

Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.

Trevor Paglen

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

Susan Sontag

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

Italo Calvino

Full-color images lack the poignancy of monochrome... Black-and-white film inherently peels off interesting images from the world; it sees things we do not see, and thus insists on the existence of a phantom presence within reality, a world we cannot perceive.

Peter C Bunnell

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

Thomas Merton

A Quote by Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors