Susan Sontag Quotes

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

The image is an image.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

Draw what you see.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.