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 โ as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan SontagSomeone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
Susan SontagPart of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling โtraditionsโ; litanies to family values are at the center of every politicianโs discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as โidentitiesโ that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.
Susan Sontag[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.
Susan Sontag