The Meaning of a Photograph

The Meaning of a Photograph

A very short essay

Göran Sjöberg

2008-12-23

If you cut out a single photograph and hypothetically send it to Mars or to a blog this photograph has no meaning when it dwells where no one will see it but possibly the mental act of doing this might be considered as an act of art partly because this act is also without practical use.

Here is another hypothetical example. Imagine that you are working at a photo lab producing prints and now and then pick up one from the stream that comes out of the machine e.g. to check printing quality. Probably, when you have been working there for a while and many thousands have passed before your eyes, you don’t even absorb what kind of image it is on the print and to an even less extent any meaning which might be attached to the image. It is for sure one of many ‘meaningless’ pictures to you. With your ‘experienced’ eye you should of course be able to see the technical qualities, the darkness, the hue etc. of the print since that is basically your job and if you did not you would probably lose your job. And then the meaning for you with all the pictures might be as simple as they give you a steady salary.

Perhaps we are now abusing the word ‘meaning’ because ‘everyone’ understands that these are ‘imbecile’ examples of what we usually mean by meaning when we are using this word when we are seriously talking about photography. A second thought might however convince us that raising the question about meaning at all in this way is perhaps not that stupid. What it tells is that it is completely useless to ask the question about the meaning with a photograph without first setting the scene for the display and here are a few suggestions.

• The family photo album

• The MoMA

• As an illustration in a scientific paper about metallurgy

• I a police file

• At a photo exhibition at a home for elderly people

• At the yearly exhibition of a local photo club

Everyone realizes that this list basically does not have any limit. So haphazardly taking one photo from the printing machine and also haphazardly to put it at any one of the displays suggested on this endless list would of course signify some kind of specific meaning but probably in most cases with a rather surrealistic effect. Such acts of ‘displacing’ images were also typical for the art school with the same name. With this it should be clear that to display an image (or a piece of art) outside an agreed upon context would in most cases produce a surrealistic effect on potential viewers. It is like with a specific religion where most of the acts for the people who are far away from that religion appear more or less surrealistic but of course not to those who are involved since they all belong to and understand the images of their own totem.

This sounds like something either black or white and as long as your images are within the ‘same cultural context’ they will not be looked upon as something alien like images from another totem and this is of course a tautology. In other words, the potential viewer will read your ‘signs’ as if you could be a good disciple of the totem. But before you could carve the ‘right’ images you must study in the religious school to be able to distinguish between the good and the evil. It was not by chance that Mohammad’s guys, upon the final arrival at Medina more than a thousand years ago, smashed all the evil images of the female goddesses (with the exception of Virgin Mary and the Kaaba stone itself) and confirmed the solid patriarchic rule which has been governing ever since not only in his part of the world but in most other parts as well.

So the whole idea is about context. In other words don’t show the wrong picture at the wrong time but show the right one at the right time. When you start thinking about it in this way it starts to be very simple. The difficult part is then to materialize this simple truth into something which is meaningful. And then we are back at the starting point which perhaps is also a good place to stop this post.