It also inspires us to embrace the freedom of art in our photography. It does not only make the reader think about philosophical questions regarding photography. There is a reason why photography students are told to read Susan Sontag’s book. “Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.” “Photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.”ġ5. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”ġ4. “So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”ġ3. “Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.”ġ2. “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”ġ1. “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation.”ġ0. ‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability… All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”ĩ. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”Ĩ. “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. “Photographs were seen as a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading.”ħ. “Photography is become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.”Ħ.

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can’t possess reality, one can possess images-one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.”ĥ. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”Ĥ.

“…there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”ģ. “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.”Ģ. Top 15 Susan Sontag on Photography Quotesġ.

On photography by susan sontag