Can visual images or photographs be seen as propositions? Yes, if we think of a proposition along with Bertrand Russell as a structured entity with objects and properties as constituents.

The way the photographs are presented on Rhizomes1 as stand alone images indicate a propositional understanding of a photograph. they are isolated self-contained entites. The propositional nature of images in the modernist art institution is simply assumed, and the endless interpretations by curators and critics are spun from these isolated images conventionally defined as propositions.

However, the photography that I did at Broken Hill was interconnected in that some were different images of a single mining structure---The Junction Mine.

eucalept, originally uploaded by poodly.

These images would then be collected into a collection on Flickr entitled Broken Hill or, as I have done, into a project entitled natural history implying some form of intervisuality.

As Daniel Chandler points out in his Semiotics for Beginners that:

One of the weaknesses of structuralist semiotics is the tendency to treat individual texts/images as discrete, closed-off entities and to focus exclusively on internal structures. Even where texts are studied as a 'corpus' (a unified collection), the overall generic structures tend themselves to be treated as strictly bounded.

Even an indexical and iconic sign such as a photograph involves a translation from three dimensions into two, and anthropologists have often reported the initial difficulties experienced by people in primal tribes in making sense of photographs and films, whilst historians note that even in recent times the first instant snapshots confounded Western viewers because they were not accustomed to arrested images of transient movements and needed to go through a process of cultural habituation or training.

As Elizabeth Chaplin puts it, 'photography introduced a new way of seeing which had to be learned before it was rendered invisible'. What human beings see does not resemble a sequence of rectangular frames, and camerawork and editing conventions are not direct replications of the way in which we see the everyday world. When we look at things around us in everyday life we gain a sense of depth from our binocular vision, by rotating our head or by moving in relation to what we are looking at. To get a clearer view we can adjust the focus of our eyes. But for making sense of depth when we look at a photograph none of this helps. We have to decode the cues.