Susan Sontag (/ˈsɒntɑːɡ/; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, literary icon, and political activist. Beginning with the publication of her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" Sontag became a lifelong international cultural and intellectual celebrity. Sontag was often photographed and her image became widely recognized even in mainstream society. Her works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, The Way We Live Now, and Regarding the Pain of Others.
Read more about Susan Sontag: Life, Work, Activism, Controversies, Personal Life, Awards and Honors
Famous quotes by susan sontag:
“All ... forms of consensus about ‘great’ books and ‘perennial’ problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ‘what is already known.’ Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, ‘fixed.’”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)