Susan Sontag Quotes

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.

I'm a student of media and I've always been one. I'm fascinated by the way we make the world around us based on pictures and how can we improve our perception of this picture world.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

What you see on TV is what you believe you can be.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

What we view in the media - and who presents it to us - does so much to determine how we think, how we feel about ourselves, and how we view the world.

If I turn on the television, am I to believe that that is America? I'm sorry, I don't believe that's America.

There's a lot more people out there than you would think who cannot differentiate between TV and reality. I do think there's a lot of people out there who think I'm a nasty human being.

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about; what they care about is the picture.

As much as we try to deny it, media plays a huge part in how we view the world.

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

Perception is everything and that becomes the reality. It's a big problem for Hillary Clinton.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

I feel that the people I see in the media are sometimes more real than I am, which is utter bullshit.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.