Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
1-1 “…photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” 3
“Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we
1-1 3
recognize as modern.”
“Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive
1-1 4
mood.”
“Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so mush as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that
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anyone can make or acquire.”
1-2 “Photographs furnish evidence…..In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates.” 5
“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph
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can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.”
1-2 “…photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.” 6-7
“From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so
1-2 7
imperial a scope.”
“…as a mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense
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against anxiety, and a tool of power.”
1-3 “photographs… help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.” 9
“The camera]… makes real what one is experiencing….A way of certifying experience…converting experience
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into an image, a souvenir.”
“The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to
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be exacerbated by travel.”
1-3 “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation.” 10
“Photography is become one of the principle devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of
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participation.”
“Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention….The person who intervenes cannot record; the person
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who is recording cannot intervene.”
“The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and at the
1-4 farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that…can be conducted from a distance, and with some 13
detachment.”
“…there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing
1-4 them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into 14
objects that can be symbolically possessed.”
“Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being
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photographed, touched with pathos.”
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability… All
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photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
“The images that mobilize conscience are always linked to a given historical situation. The more general they
1-5 17
are, the less likely they are to be effective.”
1-5 “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.” 17
“Through an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology...that
1-5 19
determines what constitutes an event.”
“What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political
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consciousness.”
“Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel….One’s first encounter with the photographic
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inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany.”
1-6 “Photographs were seen as a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading.” 22
“The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies
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interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.”
“Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph… Only that which narrates can make us
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understand.”
“The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or
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humanistic.”
1-6 “Photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.” 24
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to
1-6 24
which everyone is now addicted.”
“It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a
24
way of seeing.”
(writing of Walt Whitman) “Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most delirious prophet of cultural
2-1 27
revolution.”
2-3 Diane Arbus’s work…imposed a feeling exactly contrary to the reassuring warmth of Steichen’s material.” 32
“’The family of Man’ denies the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded
differences, injustices, and conflicts. Arbus’s photographs undercut politics just as decisively, by suggesting a
2-3 32
world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and
relationships.”
(speaking of the two shows) “…either experience serves equally well to rule out a historical understanding of
reality. … The pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective
2-3 33
both render history and politics irrelevant. One does so by universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other
by atomizing it, into horror.”
“Arbus’s work… (concentrates) on victims, or the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such
2-3 a project is expected to serve…..a dissociated point of view….unsentimental empathy with (the photograph’s) 33
subjects.”
Arbus’s photographs…suggest a naivety…based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is
2-3 34
asked to look at is really other…. That there is another world.”
2-3 “The photographer chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it.” 34
“The authority of Arbus’s photographs derives from the contrast between their lacerating subject matter and their
2-3 calm, matter-of-fact attentiveness.” …the mystery of Arbus’s photographs lies in what they suggest about how 35
the subjects felt after consenting to be photographed. …Do they know how grotesque they are?”
Arbus’s work “…excludes sufferers who presumably know they are suffering, like victims of accidents, wars,
2-3 famines, and political persecutions. Arbus would never have taken pictures of accidents…. She specialized in
slow-motion private smashups, most of which have been going on since the subject’s birth.”
“Arbus’s view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the
2-3 37
Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence.”
“In the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the
2-3 disclosure of the subject’s essence. That is why frontality seems right for ceremonial pictures (like weddings, 38
graduations) but less apt for photographs used on billboards to advertise political candidates.”
“(For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting
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instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.)”
“[Diane Arbus’s suicide] … proved the photographs to have been dangerous to her… she fell in a psychic
2-4 39
ambush, a casualty of her own candor and curiosity.“
“To discover (through photographing) that life is ‘really a melodrama,’ to understand the camera as a weapon of
2-4
aggression, implies there will be casualties.”
“In the old romance of the artist, any person who has the temerity to spend a season in hell risks not gettout alive
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or coming back psychically damaged. One volunteers to seek out the pain of others.”
“… is finally most troubling in Arbus’s photographs is not their subject at all but the cumulative impression of the
2-4 photographer’s consciousness…Arbus was …a photographer venturing out into the world to collect images that 40
are painful.”
[People seek pain] … to feel less….art is a self-willed test of hardness…life’s horror can be faced without
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squeamishness..”
“Arbus’s work is a good instance of a leading tendency of high art in capitalist countries: to suppress, or at least
reduce, moral and sensory queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is
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terrible… …art changes morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary
between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not.”
2-4 “To photograph people, according to Arbus, is necessarily ‘cruel,’ ‘mean.’ The important thing is not to blink.” 41
“The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the
2-4 photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed….You are not intervening in their lives, 42
only visiting them.”
“The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects—to
2-4 fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather 42
than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”
“Arbus’s interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being
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privileged, to vent her frustration at being safe.”
“..the inhabitants of deviant underworlds…increasingly come to infiltrate consciousness as the subject matter of
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art, acquiring a certain diffuse legitimacy and metaphoric proximity which creates all the more distance.”
Arbus …was by profession a fashion photographer—a fabricator of the cosmetic lie that masks the intractable
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inequalities of birth and class and physical appearance.”
“Arubus’s work is reactive—reactive against gentility, against what is approved…a revolt, itself hotly moralistic,
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turn(ed) against the success world.”
“The moralists’ subversion advances life as a failure as the antidote to life as a success. The aesthete’s
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subversion, …advances life as a horror show as the antidote to life as a bore.”
“Sophisticated in the familiar modernist way—[Arbus chose] awkwardness, naivety, sincerity over the slickness
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and artificiality of high art and high commerce…”
“Arbus’s photographs … [are].. in the main tradition of Surrealist art—their taste for the grotesque, their
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professed innocence with respect to their subjects, their claim that all subjects are merely objects trouves.”
3-1 “Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.” 51
“Surrealisms’ contentious idea (is) blurring objects and events, between the intended and the unintentional,
3-1 51
between pros and amateurs, between the noble and the tawdry, between craftsmanship and lucky blunders.”
“(Only when its libertarian rhetoric helped to nudge Jackson Pollock and others into a new kind of irreverent
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abstractions did the Surrealist mandate for painters finally seem to make wide creative sense.)”
“The photographers who concentrated on interfering with the supposedly superficial realism of the photograph
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were those who most narrowly conveyed photography’s surreal properties.”
“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality
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in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”
3-1 “Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences.” 52
“The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has
3-2 informed photography from the beginning, and marks the confluence of the Surrealist counter-culture and
middle-class social adventurism.”
“Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order
to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them…. Gazing on other people’s reality with
3-2 55
curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity
transcends class interests as if its perspective is universal.”
“Photography has always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths……. The perennial surreal subject
3-2 55-56
is How the Other Half Lives…”
“Photography conceived as social documentation was an instrument of that essentially middle-class attitude, both
3-2 zealous and merely tolerant, both curious and indifferent, call humanism—which found slums the most 56
enthralling of decors.”
“The justification is still the same, that picture-taking serves a high purpose: uncovering a hidden truth,
3-2 56
conserving a vanishing past.”
3-2 [John Thompson, around 1880, pioneered the vogue of at-home photographic portraiture.” 56
3-4 “The predatory side of photography is at the heart of the alliance…between photography and tourism.” 64
3-4 “The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.” 64
3-4 [The camera is]a way of taking possession of the places they (tourists) visited.” 65
“… for the main tradition of American photography—the prevailing mood is sadness… a mournful vision of
3-4 67
loss.”
3-5 “Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that.” 74
“The Surrealist strategy, which promised a new and exciting vantage point for the radical criticism of modern
culture, has devolved into an easy irony that democratizes all evidence, that equates its scatter of evidence with
75
history. Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of
oddities, a joke, a death trip.”
3-6 “The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.” 75
“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it
3-6 76
possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
3-6 [Walter Benjamin was photography’s most original and important critic.] 76
3-6 “Life is not about significant details, illuminated (in) a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” 81
“The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur’s relation to
3-6 81
the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world.”
“Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to
3-6 82
understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.”
4-1 “Many people are anxious when they’re about to be photographed…because they fear the camera’s disapproval.” 85
“The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives:
4-1 86
beautification,…and truth-telling.
4-1 “…the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance.” 86
“Once an object of wonder because of its capacity to render reality faithfully as well as despised at first for its
4-1 87
base accuracy, the camera has ended by effecting a tremendous promotion of the value of appearance.”
“Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby
4-1 87
changing the very idea of reality, and of realism.”
[In the earliest days] The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer—a scribe, not a
4-2 88
poet.”
“…photographs are evidence of not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an
4-2 88
evaluation of the world.”
“…’photographic seeing’ (is) a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform. …
4-2 Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too 89
ordinary….. (photographers) were to create interest, by new visual decisions”
“Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, ‘awaiting
the proper moment’ to take his celebrated picture, ‘Fifth Avenue, Winter.’ The proper moment is when you can
4-2 90
see things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way. The quest became the photographer’s
trademark in the popular imagination.”
4-2 “Photography seemed to have found its grandiose role, as the bridge between art and science….” 91
“…The formal qualities of style—the central issue in painting—are, at most, of secondary importance in
photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. …we don’t know how to react to a
4-2 93
photograph (if the image is visually ambiguous…) until we know what piece of the world it is. … Photography
is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things.”
“[Cameras] changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake….[a world] in which
4-2 93
observation [is] a moral duty.”
“[Photographic seeing is] the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions about what is worth
4-2 93
perceiving, which animates all modernist movements in the arts.”
“By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for
4-2 94
its great modernist vocation—abstraction.”
“The other important aspect of the relation between painting and photography…..is that the frontiers of the new
territory acquired by photography immediately started expanding. …Gradually photographers joined in the
4-2 94
pursuit of more abstract images, professing scruples reminiscent of the modernist painters’ dismissal of the
mimetic as mere picturing.”
“…photographers have come to share some of the same attitudes about the inherent value of perception exercised
4-2 for perception’s sake and the (relative) unimportance of subject matter which have dominated advanced painting 95
for more than a century, their applications of these attitudes cannot duplicate those of painting.”
4-4 “If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious.” 111
“Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive
4-4 111
relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.”
“This freezing of time—the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph—has produced new and more inclusive 111-
4-4
canons of beauty.” 112
‘…The camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a
4-4 112
means of conveying truth.”
“The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers—
4-4 displacing formalist justifications of their quest for beauty—is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty 112
underlying the photographic enterprise.”
“Nothing is more acceptable today than the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday activity
5-1 115
and as a branch of high art.”
“Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing,
5-2 116
of conscious intelligence, or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter.
5-5 “Photography, though not an art form in itself, has the peculiar capacity to turn all its subjects into works of art.” 149
6-2 “The point of the standard portraits in the bourgeois household of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to 165
confirm an ideal of the sitter (proclaiming social standing, embellishing personal appearance)…..”
“What the photograph-record confirms is, more modestly, simply that the subject exists; therefore, one can never
6-2 165
have too many.”
“But if photographs demean, paintings distort in the opposite way: they make grandiose. …Paintings invariably
166
sum up; photographs usually do not.”
“Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our elation
to the world; and the two uses are complementary. …It offers in one, easy, habit-forming activity, both
6-3 167
participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others—allowing us to participate, while confirming
alienation.”
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in
6-4 178
order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex.”
6-5 “The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust.” 179
This was created in one large table in Microsoft Word. The document was edited for typing errors, but not carefully checked for errors
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Permission granted to copy or duplicate this guide for non-profit use provided transcriber is given credit.
Sontag’s brilliance cannot be denied, nor her abilities with words, nor her knowledge of the history of photography. One can criticize
her writing style: long, dense sentences often containing multiple ideas, extensive vocabulary. It is difficult to summarize and to find a
title for, each section. The whole book is simply, “on photography;” there is no one main point. Her critique of Diane Arbus’s work
is brilliantly insightful. What is clear is that Sontag is an unhappy person writing about a subject she loves. Negativity pervades, or
invades, the whole. Probably Sontag was a disheartened idealist and social revolutionary. However, this was written at one of
America’s most difficult times, a time of great frustration for hopeful idealists. And she was ill, facing cancer. Sympathy must be
extended and negativity forgiven. That that this set of essays is provocative is an understatement.