Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
Susan SontagTo photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
Susan SontagThe camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.
Susan SontagConventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.
Susan Sontag