To take a photograph is to participate in another persons mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt. – Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. – Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. – Susan Sontag
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life — its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness — conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. – Susan Sontag
Be it deep or shallow, red or black, sand or clay, the soil is the link between the rock core of the earth and the living things on its surface. It is the foothold for the plants we grow. Therein lies the main reason for our interest in soils. – Roy Simonson, USDA Yearbook of Agriculture, 1957