Susan Sontag
American writer and critic (1933 to 2004); author of the essay collections Against Interpretation (1966) and On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Susan Sontag did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
The line under a date shows how recently it was said: empty within a month, full after three years.
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Their wordsAnd the disgust and pity that pictures like Hicks’s inspire should not distract from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths you are not being shown.
↗Looking at War (The New Yorker)newyorker.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Our reading
A photograph is never simply transparent: to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude
Their wordsBut the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
↗Looking at War (The New Yorker)newyorker.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThe problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering.
↗Looking at War (The New Yorker)newyorker.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsImages shown on television are, by definition, images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate, by its surfeit of images.
↗Looking at War (The New Yorker)newyorker.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 15 months earlier
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Our reading
Public figures and commentators responding to the September 11 attacks were infantilizing the public
Their wordsThe disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.
↗Tuesday, and After (The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, her contribution)newyorker.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsIn the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.
↗Tuesday, and After (The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, her contribution)newyorker.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThe unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
↗Tuesday, and After (The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, her contribution)newyorker.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsPolitics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.
↗Tuesday, and After (The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, her contribution)newyorker.com 4th of 4 in this piece
The line under a date fills as the words age, a quarter at a time: past a month, six months, a year, and three years. Empty means said within the last month; full, more than three years ago. It says when, not whether it still holds — a change of mind is marked on the claim itself.
Dashed means we only know the words existed by that date; they may be older.