Extract and Artist Quotes from Susan Sontag's 'On Photography'

(p.87) 'Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism.'

Taken from 'A BRIEF ANTHOLOGY OF QUOTATIONS'

"I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length that longing has been satisfied." - Julia Margaret Cameron

"I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases - but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing...the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say...that I would rather have a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist's work ever produced." - Elizabeth Barrett (Letter to Mary Russell Mitford)

"I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph." - Man Ray

"You can photograph anything now." - Robert Frank

"I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice." - Minor White

"Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles." - Frederick Sommer

"Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite." - John Szarkowski

"I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed." - Gary Winogrand

"These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago. I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me." - Ansel Adams