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"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."
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"With the selfies, a photographer has finally found his place in a photograph."

"What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not."

"And I remember walking in there and, I must say, I was quite unnerved the closer I got to it."

"You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery."

"Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into light, texture, shape and shadow."

"Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one."

"In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated."

"In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners."

"Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection."

"Never boss people around. It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter."
Explore more quotes by Susan Sontag

"Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone."

"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."

"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing " which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."

"For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering."

"All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here."

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."

"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."

"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."
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