# Quote — Susan Sontag, On Photography

> Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.

- Author: [Susan Sontag](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susan-sontag.md)
- Book: [On Photography](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susan-sontag/on-photography.md)
- Page: 161
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/On_Photography#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/susan-sontag/on-photography/reality-has-come

## More from this book

> Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susan-sontag/on-photography/photography-has-become.md)

> Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

p. 29 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susan-sontag/on-photography/whitman-thought-he-was.md)

> The flâneur is not attracted to the city's official realities but to its dark seamy corners, the neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer 'apprehends,' as a detective apprehends a criminal."

p. 55 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susan-sontag/on-photography/the-flaneur-is-not.md)