Susan Sontag Quotes

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

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.

I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.

The camera is a kind of license.

Forget the camera, forget the lens, forget all of that. With any four-dollar camera, you can capture the best picture.

There's this thing that publishes pictures of people out and about. So when I go out, I do see pictures of myself. I don't know where those pictures come from - I mean, I don't see the cameras. But I guess I'm just not looking for them.

When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

I wish that more and more adventurous young men would give up the gun in favour of the camera.

Cameras always were seductive. And then a darkroom became available, and that's when I stopped doing anything else.

The only thing that gets in the way of a really good photograph, is the camera

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Either the camera will dance, or I will.

Photography sees surfaces, it doesn't see space. We see space but the camera doesn't.

You can't point a camera at someone and find out what's in their head. But it does the next best thing - it lets you speculate.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.

I usually befriend the camera department very early on in the film and drive them nuts. I'm constantly bombarding them with questions and going through the stills photography. A film set is a great place for me and I love it.

At the other end of the room, Grandma had the lid up on Larry Lipinski. She was standing one foot on a folding chair, one foot on the edge of the casket, and she was taking pictures with a disposable camera.

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

If you walk across my camera I will flash the world your story.

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.