Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Interpretation
The quote critiques society's obsession with photographs and images as a form of consumerism that affects our perception of reality.
Susan Sontag's quote reflects on the contemporary human condition, where the constant need for photographic evidence influences our understanding of reality. She argues that this reliance on images transforms individuals into 'image-junkies', leading to a form of addiction that diminishes genuine experience and creates a cycle of mental pollution, as people increasingly value images over authentic interactions and realities.
In practice
In a discussion about modern consumer culture.
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
There are two sorts of hypocrites: ones that are deceived with their outward morality and external religion; and the others are those that are deceived with false discoveries and elevation; which often cry down works, and men's own righteousness, and tlak much of free grace, but at the same time make a righteousness of their discoveries and of their humiliation, and exalt themselves to heaven with them.
I'm worried that the audience is being conditioned. That's my real fear. Because if they don't want to see wrinkles on the screen, if they actually fear looking at them, then it's only going to get worse. Those of us who don't want to shoot up and cut and sew, we're just not going be cast.
Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.
No man can be subject to any laws, excepting those which have received the assent of himself or his representatives and which are promulgated beforehand and applied legally.
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream
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