QuoteProject
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.
Susan Sontag
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

PhotographyConsumerismRealitySocietyMental Pollution

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about modern consumer culture.

More from Susan Sontag

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
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
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.
Susan SontagRead
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.
Susan SontagRead

Similar quotes

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.
George Bernard ShawRead
As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers
Andr AcimanRead
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
Emile M. CioranRead
America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.
Tom MorelloRead
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
Herbert MarcuseRead
When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
Alan WattsRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.