Susan Sontag Quotes

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

It's good that everyone has an opportunity to take pictures, the chance to be a photographer. Some are good, too. But the bad thing is that it's very, very difficult to take a great picture. Everyone can take a good picture - even a child - but it's hard to make a great one.

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

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

It's clever, but is it Art?

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

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

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

With photography, I always think that it's not good enough.