1
But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.Susan Sontag
2
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
3
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.Susan Sontag
4
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.Susan Sontag
5
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.Susan Sontag
6
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.Susan Sontag
7
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs–especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past–are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the eroticfeelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.Susan Sontag
8
The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.Susan Sontag
9
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.Susan Sontag