My photo essay for VCL

1. “A photograph is not an opinion.
Or is it?”

2. “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.”

3. “Ambition, if it feeds at all, does
so on the ambition of others.”

4. “Mallarme said that everything exists in order to end in a book. Today
everything exists to end in a photograph.”

5. “Still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture.”

6. “Interpretation is the revenge
of the intellectual upon art.”

7. “The painter constructs, the
photographer discloses.”

8. “The life of the creative man is
lead, directed and controlled by
boredom. Avoiding boredom is
one of our most important
purposes.”

9. “It is not altogether wrong to say
that there is no such thing as a
bad photograph – only less
interesting, less relevant, less
mysterious ones.”

10. “To photograph is to confer importance.”

11. “Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are.”

12. “It is not the position, but the disposition.”

13. “Although none of the rules
for becoming more alive is
valid, it is healthy to keep on
formulating them.”

14. “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and
eventually, in one’s own.”

15. Credits
The final picture was a self portrait. All other
photographs are by Cassie Refling.
All quotes are from Susan Sontag.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.