Portrait of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz in a nun's habit.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

“She Attempts to Minimize the Praise Occasioned by a Portrait of Herself...,”

 c. 1690

    This that you gaze on, colorful deceit,
that so immodestly displays art’s favors,
with its fallacious arguments of colors
is to the senses cunning counterfeit,
    this on which kindness practiced to delete
from cruel years accumulated horrors,
constraining time to mitigate its rigors,
and thus oblivion and age defeat,
    is but an artifice, a sop to vanity,
is but a flower by the breezes bowed,
is but a ploy to counter destiny,
    is but a foolish labor, ill-employed,
is but a fancy, and, as all may see,
is but cadaver, ashes, shadow, void.

Portrait of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz in a nun's habit.

Susan Sontag

On Photography,

 1977

When we are nostalgic, we take pictures. It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

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