Susan Sontag Quotes

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Photography is a pursuit that allows you to be very hands-on with what you show people of either yourself or the art you want to make, and acting is kind of the exact opposite. You do have a modicum of creative freedom as an actor, but you're still very much a cipher for other people's art.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

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.

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.

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

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

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.