Phantom Limb Cruft

(Reparation for Events Real and Imagined)
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Started November 19, 2012.
Updates at 5:52 and 11:52 AM & PM EST
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Selections from the Archive

Created July 28, 2016 at 05:52 PM EST

Created April 16, 2019 at 05:52 PM EST

Created January 14, 2013 at 05:52 AM EST

Created January 30, 2013 at 05:52 PM EST

Created July 28, 2016 at 05:52 PM EST

Further Resources

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image–junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world—all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

— On Photography, Susan Sontag