Susan Sontag Quotes

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

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

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

Photographing a cake can be art.

Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Photography, not soft gutless painting, is best equipped to bore into the spirit of today.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.