Susan Sontag Photograph Quotations

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture

Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

To photograph is to confer importance.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.