“Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”
More from Susan Sontag on Art
“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”
“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“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”
John Keats
10 quotes“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other peop...”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
Ansel Adams
7 quotes“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful...”
Ezra Pound
7 quotes“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”