Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis

Sontag explains that a picture's meaning is derived through a synthesis of artifice, context and experience. Unless the viewer has a strong grasp of the subject's original context, viewer response can be managed with captions. In the absence of any context, viewers will read into an image, imprinting it with their own perspective. Once more, Sontag refutes Woolf's idea of camera as the objective eye. She notes, however, that it is in the late 1930s, at the time Woolf expresses this idea, that photojournalism is on the rise, appearing in magazines expressly dedicated to photographic images.

Sontag considers the way that photographs are presented in popular media, methods which further distance the subject matter from its original context. In newsprint, photos are surrounded by words. In magazines, full-paged photos must compete for the viewer's attention with equally large ads, a contrast...