Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
The disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken, the inevitable even when inadvertent authority of the results, suggest a very tenuous relation to knowing.
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Only that which narrates can make us understand.
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.
The two powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. Lately, the most common exaggeration is one that regards these powers as opposites.
A lot of people in the early decades of photography tried to treat it as if it were simply some kind of copying machine, as an aid in reproducing or dispensing a certain kind of visual information, but not itself as an independent source of seeing or of material that would fundamentally change our visual sensibility, as, in fact, it has.
For photographs to accuse and possibly alter conduct, they must shock.
