photo essay - cassie refling

“A photograph is not an opinion.

Or is it?”

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

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

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

everything exists to end in a photograph.”

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

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

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is

one of our most important purposes.”

“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.”

“To photograph is to confer importance.”

“Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”

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

“Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is

valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.”

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

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.