“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
More from Susan Sontag on Art
“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”
“Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”
“Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
“Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.”
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.”
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
John Keats
10 quotes“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”
W.H. Auden
7 quotes“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of...”
Steven Pressfield
7 quotes“...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.”