“To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more—and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.”
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– Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
– AIDS and its Metaphors, 1989
Quotes of the week in honor of World AIDS Day: ” ‘Plague’ is the principal metaphor by which the AIDS epidemic is understood. And because of AIDS, the popular misidentification of cancer as an epidemic, even a plague, seems to be receding: AIDS has banalized cancer.” (p. 44) “With this illness, one that elicits so…
– “Trip to Hanoi,” Styles of Radical Will, 1969
“I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don’t enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt,…
– On Photography, 1977
“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”
Director Nancy Kates Named to the Out 100
Director Nancy Kates is named to the Out 100 with colleague Cheryl Furjanic. http://www.out.com/out-exclusives/out100-2014/2014/11/11/out100-documentarians-cheryl-furjanic-nancy-kates
– Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, 1980
“Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.”
– “Notes on ‘Camp’,” 1964
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much.”
Charlie Varon, San Francisco playwright
I felt uneasy watching the film but wasn’t sure quite why. . .The many lovers, the many art forms she dips her toe in, the adoring critics and bohemians saying worshipful things. There is something attractive about that New York literary scene… and also something about it all that makes me queasy. Then Susan Sontag’s…
– Maxine Hong Kingston
In a time of destruction, create something.