#melancholy objects

[surfacetexture]

Gazing on other people's curiosity with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer acts as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its perspective is universal.

Susan Sontag, Melancholy Objects 

[unshynessmoviesbooks]

Though some photographs, considered as individual objects, have the bite and sweet gravity of important works of art, the proliferation of photographs is ultimately an affirmation of kitsch. Photography's ultra-mobile gaze flatters the viewer, creating a false sense of ubiquity, a deceptive mastery of experience.

Susan Sontag, "Melancholy Objects"

[unshynessmoviesbooks]

To quote from a movie is not the same as quoting from a book. Whereas the reading time of a book is up to the reader, the viewing time of a film is set by the filmmaker and the images are perceived only as fast or as slowly as the editing permits. Thus, a still, which allows one to linger over a single moment as long as one likes, contradicts the very form of film, as a set of photographs that freezes moments in a life or a society contradicts their form, which is a process, a flow in time. The photographed world stands in the same, essentially inaccurate relation to the real world as stills do to movies. Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Susan Sontag, "Melancholy Objects"

[albumofquotes]

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.

[albumofquotes]

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.

[albumofquotes]

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.

[albumofquotes]

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.

[albumofquotes]

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.