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  • The American Scholar

    Image Is Not Everything

    Sep 03, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by Steven G. Kellman

    SONTAG: Her Life and Work

    BY BENJAMIN MOSER

    Ecco, 832 pp., $39.99

    NO VERBIAGE MARS the visual immediacy of The biography’s cover is filled entirely by a photograph of its subject, a cynosure of American cultural life from the 1960s until her death in 2004. An androgynous figure who might have been a fashion model if she were not an essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and activist, she is both seductive and defiant as she challenges the viewer with a knowing gaze. Sontag did, in fact, appear in an Absolut Vodka ad, and her glamorous image was captured by many Though rarely at a loss for words, she was, famously, “Against Interpretation,” preferring pictures to words but “reality” itself to either verbal or visual representations of it.

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