By Susan Sontag. Find the book.
[…] there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
— p. 14
In photography’s early decades, photographs were expected to be idealized images. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset.
— p. 28
To photograph is to confer importance.
— p. 28
… as in the prescient series of “secret” photographs of anonymous New York subway rides that Evans took with a concealed camera between 1939 and 1941.
— p. 30
“You see someone on the street,” Arbus wrote, “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.”
— p. 34
There is something on people’s faces when they don’t know they are being observed that never appears when they do. If we did not know how Walker Evans took his subway photographs (riding the New York subways for hundreds of hours, standing, with the lens of his camera peering between two buttons of his topcoat), it would be obvious from the pictures themselves that the seated passengers, although photographed close and frontally, didn’t know they were being photographed; their expression are private ones, not those they would offer to the camera.
— p. 37