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August 3, 2009
Photography basically aligned itself with positivism in the 19th and early 20th century. Hence the idea of it's likeness or resemblance to what it represents, photography being a mirror of reality; representing truth; photography as objective recording of the facts; photography as realistically rendering what it represents. And so.
This view of photography is deeply held in our culture, in spite of the acknowledgment or recognition that a photograph is an interpretation of what is due to the person using a machine to take the photograph. We become so used to such conventions in our use of various media that they seem 'natural', and when we take these relationships for granted we treat the signified as unmediated or 'transparent', as when we interpret television or photography as 'a window on the world'.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Enterprise Development Centre, Broken Hill, 2009
A growing consensus is that though analogical photography is a fine technology, it is often deemed to have failed: it has failed to give us the world. Our expectations of it are so loaded it has no choice but to let us down in terms of truth. Thus we become aware of how signs are related to their signifieds by social conventions.
The critique of photography as reportage, photojournalism and documentary, which are founded on a positivist understanding of photography has centred on this resemblance claim. It highlights photography's semiotic or coded structure to our culture as well as its indexical relationship to the object. The image or sign refers to other other images and signs as well as to the real buildings and urbanscape. We are dealing with signs, not with an unmediated objective reality, and sign systems are involved in the construction of meaning.
The rhetoric of a photograph-- eg., a tourist image of Broken Hill that seduces us to visit the silver city---requires the semiotic reference to other images (intertextuality) as well as the "I have been there", and this opens up the different interpretations of a photograph by viewers depending on the context. Meaning is not passively absorbed but arises only in the active process of interpretation. Our systems of signs speak to us as much as we speak in and through them.
Those who control the sign systems (eg., the mass media) control the construction of reality.
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About "The rhetoric of a photograph . . . requires the semiotic reference to other images (intertextuality) as well as the 'I have been there'": in "Two grammars" and "Imagine being remembered," two recent posts to my blog at I try to consider photographic intertextuality in a way that maximizes photographic formalism and minimizes external reference.