Like a Movie
"The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was described as "unreal," "surreal," "like a movie," in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby." (22)
In this quote, Sontag is pointing out the effects of movies on cultural and popular perceptions of catastrophe. For many years, Hollywood has produced movies that depict such terrible acts of violence, and by seeing them repeatedly, people have come to associate such images with movies. Consequently, when people see such horrible events as the 9/11 attacks, they no longer think it's "like a dream," but instead "like a movie."
A Quotation of Life
"The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb." (22)
This sentence summarizes Sontag's view on the nature of photography. A photograph is essentially a quotation of life: it takes a snapshot of a particular image from a larger passage (i.e., an event, etc.) and preserves it for future use. Her analogy of the maxim/proverb is equally applicable: it goes into the viewer's memory in the same way as a proverb might, becoming another small, pithy piece of wisdom or argument that might be recalled at a moment's notice.
Clandestine Knowledge
"Atrocity photographs were scarce in the winter of 1936-37: the depiction of war's horrors in the photographs Woolf evokes in Three Guineas seemed almost like clandestine knowledge." (24)
In this passage, Sontag is noting how the widespread use of violent images in modern society has negated some of its original, novel effect. At the time of the publishing of Three Guineas, the images were still new, shocking, and horrifying. By the time of Sontag's writing, however, such images have become so prevalent that their meaning is nearly lost through a dulling of the senses.
Zoo Animals
"Generally, the grievously injured bodies shown in published photographs are from Asia or Africa. This journalistic custom inherits the centuries-old practice of exhibiting exotic - that is, colonized - human beings: Africans and denizens of remote Asian countries were displayed like zoo animals in ethnological exhibitions mounted in London, Paris, and other European capitals from the sixteenth until the early twentieth century." (72)
This quote sheds a bleak light on the practices of Western cultures in using the foreign-ness of Africa and Asia as a marketing tool. Instead of displaying oddities from far-away countries in a sort of carnival sideshow, photographers have begun to display similarly foreign horrors through a digital lens, although this time with a more serious gravity.
A Still from a Movie
"But a war photograph seems inauthentic, even though there is nothing staged about it, when it looks like a still from a movie." (78)
In this quote, Sontag is illustrating a profound truth about the development of movies and their effect on the perceptions of the general public. Steven Spielberg and other famous directors have composed gripping movies with starkly horrific images, many based on real-life war photographs, which have had moderate success in achieving the same intended effect as those original photographs. There is, however, an unfortunate side effect: by making these war photographs seem like scenes from a movie, the is a retroactive devaluation of those images, making them seem surreal and therefore ineffective in their original designs.
