Une attente de plus en plus courte...

"(...) shrunk the interval between sighting the picture and holding it in one's hands (from the first Kodak, when it took weeks for a developed roll of film to be returned to the amateur photographer, to the Polaroid, which ejects the image in a few seconds (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p157

Retour vers les vieilles habitudes

"(...) But now the camera could be said to be turning back upon itself. The Polaroid camera revives the principle of the daguerreotype camera: each print is a unique object. (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p125

Susan Sontag / Plus belles avec l'age...

"(...) the objects that are photographs not only proliferate in a way that paintings don't but are, in a certain sense, aesthetically indestructible. (...) Photographs, when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better. (...) [like] architecture, whose works (...) probably look better as ruins. (...)" and also "(...) while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough. (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p79 et p141

Tranche de temps ou flux continu ?

"(...) Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p17

Reflet de l'acceleration du changement social

"(...) Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available is available to record what is disappearing. (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / pp 15-16

La photographie structure le regard

"(...) In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p3

Eugene Delacroix / photographier avant la photographie

"(...) In 1850, Delacroix noted in his journal (...) Since the light of the star which was daguerreotyped took twenty years to traverse the space separating it from the earth, the ray which was fixed on the plate had consequently left the celestial sphere a long time before Daguerre had discovered the process by means of which we have just gained control of this light (...)"

Eugene Delacroix cité par Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p157

Alfred Stieglitz / trois heures dans le blizzard

"(...) Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, 'awaiting the proper moment' to take his celebrated picture, 'Fifth Avenue, Winter' (...)"

Afred Stieglitz, cité par Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p90

Berenice Abbott / producteur du passe

"(...) The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past. (...)"

Citation de Berenice Abbott, reproduit par Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p67

Diane Arbus / des catastrophes privees au ralenti

"(...) Arbus would never have taken pictures of accidents, events that break into a life; she specialized in slow-motion private smashups, most of which had been going since the subject's birth. (...)"

Susan Sontag / On photography / Penguin Books / 2002 pour l'édition consultée / p36