Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the nature of photography as a means to capture and hold onto reality, which is otherwise fleeting and elusive.
Susan Sontag's quote explores the paradox of photography: while it allows us to capture moments and memories, it simultaneously indicates that we can never truly hold onto reality itself. Photography serves as a tool for preserving our perceptions of the world, but it highlights the limitations of those images in truly representing the present, as we can only ever refer back to what has already transpired, making us prisoners of our captured past.
Themes
PhotographyRealityImagesPastPerception
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation on the impact of photography on art appreciation.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes →Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
Susan SontagRead
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan SontagRead
Similar quotes
Music is everybody's possession.
John LennonRead
Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.
Jean DubuffetRead
So often when Black men have to play roles on TV, we're either the noble savage or we're completely a savage, and there's no nuance.
Don CheadleRead
We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.
Yehudi MenuhinRead
Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.
Okakura KakuzoRead
I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations.
Joyce TennesonRead