All SUSAN SONTAG Quotes about “Past”

“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”
“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”
“art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.”
“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”
“I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.”
“People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.”
“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”

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