The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the…

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Sourced, On Photography (1977)

“The Heroism of Vision”, p. 105

Other Susan Sontag Quotes

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. - View Quote Details on The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress…
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. - View Quote Details on The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can…
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. - View Quote Details on The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary…
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions. - View Quote Details on We are told we must choose — the old or…
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. - View Quote Details on In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of…
One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling… which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking. - View Quote Details on One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between…
Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.
Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed. - View Quote Details on Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the…
The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion… the powerless saying: I’m here, too. - View Quote Details on The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has…
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don’t take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It’s something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not “really” Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all. - View Quote Details on Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond…
The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide. - View Quote Details on The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which…