#susan sontag on photography

[celluloidwickerman]

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 3)

Part 2 ‘We were here, too, once and please take care of us for a while.’ ‘With digital technology,’ wrote memoirist Annie Ernaux, ‘we drained reality dry.’ As digital creatures, we carry out an endless taxidermy upon our experiences in the ever frenzied pursuit of content. Ernaux’s poignant criticism echoes Susan Sontag’s earlier weariness at what cameras had done to our ability to simply…

[ghosthierophant]

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / Regarding the Pain of Others (Susan Sontag)

[namedvesta]

“I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive...  I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable soldier — struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself.”

— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980.

— Diane Arbus, “Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C.𝟣𝟫𝟨𝟧.”

[onenakedfarmer]

SUSAN SONTAG On Photography

For [Diane] Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

[nobeerreviews]

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

-- Susan Sontag

(Madrid)

[sentientglue]

attempting to romanticise my silly little academic side quest to articulate the pursuit of a single original thought (writing a phd research proposal)

[woundgallery]

Susan Sontag and Peter Hujar en Perfect lovers. Art in the time of AIDS.  Show of the ART AIDS Foundation en Fundació Suñol. Barcelona.

[pinkmoonmp3]

alison oliver via instagram

[riverswater]

In Plato’s Cave, On Photography, Susan Sontag (x)

[hiyutekivigil]

[avatar-state-kate]

RIP Susan Sontag you would have written the greatest critique of Alex garlands civil war (2024)

[fallensapphires]

Objects: Old Fashioned Cameras (2/?)

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

[ghosthierophant]

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / @causticameracrap 's Nope essay

[belacqui-pro-quo]

Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder — a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world.

— Susan Sontag, "In Plato's Cave", from On Photography

[nobeerreviews]

But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.

-- Susan Sontag

(Aiud, Romania)

[sunriserollercoaster]

on photography, susan sontag