To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

Susan Sontag
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado. - Isabel Allende
  2. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. - Susan Sontag
  3. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. - Susan Sontag
  4. Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? ­ - Henri CartierBresson
  5. The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation. - Susan Meiselas
More Quotes By Susan Sontag
  1. The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
  2. That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.
  3. A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]
  4. The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
  5. Writing is a mysterious activity.
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