Susan Sontag understands interpretation itself to be quintessentially narrative in nature, and since without accompanying captions and analyses, photographs cannot tell a story, or even generate a complete understanding of the situation they are expressing, they are neither narratives, nor therefore, interpretations. In fact, left to themselves, photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale.

In short, they are not 'writing' and thus relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness. Without the narrative coherence of prose, photographs do not qualify as interpretations at all; whilst photography is faulted for not being writing. What we have is a defence of the position of the value of the written word over photographic images; and or even the value of narrative coherence and understanding over all other forms of
understanding.

Judith Butler in her "Photography, War, Outrage,"published in the house journal of the Modern Language Association: PMLA 120(3):822-27, 2005, disputes Susan Sontag’s claim that pictures cannot create and sustain a distinctive interpretation of an event because they are too selective:

For our purposes, it makes sense to consider that the mandated visual image produced by embedded reporting, the one that complies with state and defense department requirements, builds an interpretation. ... We do not have to have a caption or a narrative at work to understand that a political background is being explicitly formulated and renewed through the frame. In this sense, the frame takes part in the interpretation of the war compelled by the state; it is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly." (p. 823)