Album of Quotes

A collection of quotes regarding Photography and Visual Culture.

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A photograph could also be described as a quotation, which makes a book of photographs like a book of quotations.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Stephen Daniels (1993) Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalized pathos of looking at time past.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Photography is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects-unpremediated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut. Any collection of photographs is an exercise in Surrealist montage and the Surrealist abbreviation of history.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in ones own.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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What renders a photographs surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.

Susan Sontag, from ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Our ability to stomach this rising grotesqueness in images (moving or still) and in print has a stiff price. In the long run, it works out not as a liberation of but as a subtraction from the self: a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life.

Susan Sontag, from ‘America, Seen Through Photographs Darkly’ in On Photography, 1977.

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The normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subject's essence.

Susan Sontag, from ‘America, Seen Through Photographs Darkly’ in On Photography, 1977.

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The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it.

Susan Sontag, from ‘America, Seen Through Photographs Darkly’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public events comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at in photographed form.

Susan Sontag, from ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography, 1977.

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It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing.

Susan Sontag, from ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography, 1977.

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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.

Susan Sontag, from ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography, 1977.