Friday, March 02, 2007


So, over the past week or so, there's been a lot of discussion on various photography blogs about "meaning" in photography (possibly inspired by the meaningless photographs of Jeff Wall). Art (or, perhaps, "art") seems to attract this kind of analysis and it can get fairly heated. I'm not really sure why this is, but maybe, just maybe, it's because people are more fond of certainty than uncertainty. People like things to have meaning. Actually, it's not just "meaning" that they seem to want, but a meaning, a correct meaning. In this instance, what did the photographer intend when he or she took the photograph? What should the photograph mean to the viewer?

But, there isn't such a thing as a "correct" meaning. What I saw when I took the above photograph (or any of the preceding photographs) is almost undoubtedly not what a viewer might see. What I get from looking at other people's photographs might be worlds away from what they felt when they took their photograph. And, just to add to the confusion, what I see when I take a photograph isn't necessarily what I see later when I process that photograph, and I'll bet I'm not the only photographer who's had that happen. So, which meaning is correct in a case like that? The one the picture had when I took it, or the one it had when I looked at it later?

Art inspires an awful lot of air.

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