850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.

Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals,