Susan Sontag Quotes on Truth
Susan Sontag's late writings on the moral epistemology of images — particularly On Photography (1977) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) — give the question of truth in visual representation one of its most rigorous late-twentieth-century treatments. The framework presses the case that the photograph's apparent documentary fidelity is at once its principal cognitive resource and its principal moral risk: the still image abstracts the suffering it preserves from the political conditions that produced it, and the practiced consumption of such images can substitute for the patient reading of text and history through which genuine understanding of the depicted situations would have to be acquired.
Quotes
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“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
p. 7 -
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
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Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
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“Ours is an age which consciously pursues health , and yet only believes in the reality of sickness . The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.”
Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963) -
“The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963) -
“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”
The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9