A Quote by Susan Sontag

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. — © Susan Sontag
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgements, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility.
Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.)
As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.
I never know in advance what I will photograph,...I Go Out into the World and Hope I Will come across something that Imperatively interests me. I Am Addicted to the Found object. I have No doubt that I Will Continue to make Photographs till my last Breath.
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
I'm a reasonable kind of guy. If I hear something that seems to make sense, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If the alternative explanation has to be pounded into shape before it fits the mould of our experience, it seems to me that it's unlikely to be true.
One of the magical things about photography is the transformation that takes place when you photograph something. Something that inherently has very little going for it in terms of the interest you take in it, can become infinitely more interesting when rendered as a photograph. It's no longer a building. It's a photograph.
There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.
Saudi Arabia is so conservative. At first there were photographs of women I took that I couldn't publish - of women without their abayas. So I started writing out little anecdotes about things I couldn't photograph and wove it in with a more obscure picture and called it "moments that got away". I realised these worked as well as the photographs by themselves. There are a lot of photographers who feel the story is all in the photographs but I really believe in weaving in complementary words with the pictures.
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.
What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
If something can be proven to work, we should try it... Making sure that our young folk get the best education is the only thing that matters to me, and if something can be shown to work in doing that or if something's worth trying to do that, then I'll certainly be in the market for it.
Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'.
Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy
Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.
One of the things I like about doing science, the thing that is the most fun, is coming up with something that seems ridiculous when you first hear it but finally seems obvious when you're finished.
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