In! i'i |>i ' i MM i rh. ii i up .i| ili . INTERPRETATION, MEANING, AND PERSONAL SIGNIFICANCE A distinction can be made between significance and meaning. n Significance is more ( IIAI'll Ii 4 personal than meaning. Significance refers to how a photograph aliens us or what it means to us. Meaning is more objective than significance, referring to w h a t the pho lograph is about in itself or what several people would infer or what can be made obvious to any informed viewer. A similar distinction between "meaning in" and "meaning to" helps the interpreter stay on track in presenting an interpretation ol the photograph.35 What a photograp h means to me may not be what the photograph is about in itself. Personal significance and personal associations with photographs Types of Photographs are valuable to each of us, but they may be too idiosyncratic, too personal, to In- valuable to others who wish to u n d e r s t a n d more about the image itself. If our inter- pretations are too personal and too idiosyncratic, they become more about us and less about the image. Another way of saying this is that "if interpretation is not ref- erenced to visual properties (in the image), discourse leaves the realm of criticism and becomes conjecture, therapy, reminiscence, or some other manner of purely subjective functioning."36 INCE THE EARLY YEARS of photography, people have been placing photo- THE COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETERS S graphs in categories. In 1839, the year the medium was invented, photography Ultimately, viable interpretations are those held by a community of informed inter- was divided into its two oldest and most enduring categories when it was pro- 1 preters that includes critics, artists, historians, dealers, collectors, and viewers. claimed to be both a science and an a r t . Interpretations, in the end, are a collective endeavor arrived at by a variety of peo- Another time-honored division from the early years of photography, and still in ple observing, talking and writing about, and revising their understandings of com- use but with different labels, divides photographs made as art into two groups, pic- plex and dynamic images made by sophisticated image makers. Julia Kristeva torialist and purist. More current terms for these divisions are "manipulated" and pleads for a n "ethics of modesty" for all interpreters—that is, that no o n e considers "straight." The division was antagonistic; at issue was the means of making pho- his or her perception as the only possible one.37 Michael Parsons, an art educator, tographs. In 1861 C. Jabez Hughes, a pictorialist, declared: "If a picture cannot be has written insightfully about the community of art interpreters: produced by one negative, let him have two or ten; but... the picture when fin- ished must stand or fall entirely by the effects produced and not the means as we look at a painting, we presuppose the company ol others who are also looking employed."2 The straight aesthetic, however, would mandate that photographers at it. We are imaginatively one of a group who discuss the painting because they see use techniques considered "photographic" rather than hand-manipulated and the same details, and can help each other to understand them. The painting exists "painterly." In 1904 critic Sadakichi Hartmann promoted straight photography: "In not between the two individual poles of the artist and the viewer but in the midst of short, compose the picture which you intend to take so well that the negative will an indefinite group of persons who are continually reconstructing it—a community 3 be absolutely perfect and in need of n o or but slight manipulation." About twenty of viewers.38 years later Edward Weston reiterated the straight position, declaring "the approach 4 The community is corrective: It won't accept .my Interpretation unless the inter- to photography is through realism." pretation is sensible and contributes to knowledge; on the other hand, the commu- Photography historian Beaumont Newhall, in his 1964 edition of The History of nity of interpreters disallows dogmatic and Inflexible understandings because it Photography, divides photographs into four stylistic trends: straight, formalistic, knows that art objects are ultimately rich object! thai arc less than determinable documentary, and equivalent. 5 He identifies Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward and that our understandings of them will continue to shilt, usually subtly but some- Weston, and Ansel Adams as paradigm examples of those employing a straight times dramatically. By following the p r i n c i p l e ! detailed in this chapter we can join approach "in which the ability of the camera to record exact images with rich tex- in that dialogue, contribute to it, and benefit lioin it ture and great detail is used to interpret nature and man, never losing contact with I i I " III I'M. .1 in|l .11 111 '. Mlnnr. i< II its more about the artist, and windows more about the world. Milieu-, reality." Man Kay and Fazio Moholy-Nagy arc Identified With the loimalistic siylc, aie loiiiantiiiilly '.ell expressive, exhibit concern lor formal elegance ratlin than wlik'h Newhall typifies as a means ol isolating and oigaiu/mg loi in lor its own sake deft upturn, ate generally made from a close vantage point for simplicity by absiiai without the use ol cameras and without a concern lot the photograph. The sublet t turn, and lavoi subject matter such as virgin landscapes, pure geometry, the nniileu matter is paramount in documentary, which is essentially a desire "to record with tillable nude-, and social abstractions such as "the young." Windows are icalisiii out Intrusion, to inform honestly, accurately, and above all, convincingly." The term explorations more concerned with description than suggestion that attempt to equivalent, borrowed from Stieglitz, designates photographic metaphors, "charged explain more and dramatize less and which usually deal with subject matter (hat is with emotional significance and inner meaning," but which are "first of all, pho specific to a particular time and space, and they can usually be dated by evidence tographs." Newhall is not neutral about these categories and promotes the straight within the picture. aesthetic and approaches that are considered uniquely photographic. He cites pho- In the 1970s Time-Life publications came out with a widely distributed series ol tographs made by Walker Evans and other photographers employed by the Farm books, the Life Library of Photography. One book of the series, The Great Themes, Security Administration as documentary images. Stieglitz referred to his own pho- uses the following categories to cover photography: the human condition, still life, tographs of clouds as equivalents, and Newhall mentions the photographic land- portraits, the nude, nature, war. scapes Minor White made as other examples of equivalents. In "Six Ideas in Photography," an exhibition she curated in 1989 for the sesqui- centennial of the invention of photography, Gretchen Garner offered these cate- CATEGORIES O F P H O T O G R A P H S gories: Time Suspended—photography is time's witness, stopping it forever; A Wider World—photography shows us distant, hidden, and exotic worlds; Famous In two of the photography exhibitions he has organized, John Szarkowski proposes Faces—through photographs, the famous are familiar; Minute Detail—optical clar- categories through which we may view photographs. In the exhibition and subse- ity reveals a richly textured universe; Private Theater—the camera is an intimate quent book published in 1966 called The Photographer's Eye, he embraces pho- audience for the photographer's dreams; and Pictorial Effect—form, color, and tex- tographs from both the art and science categories and identifies five characteristics ture are created through photography.8 that he considers unique to photography: There are also subdivisions of categories. Sally Eauclaire, as the curator of a trav- The thing itself—photography deals with the actual. eling exhibition of color photographs, wrote an accompanying catalogue, The New The detail—photography is tied to the facts of things. Color Photography of the 1970s. She divided the large category of recent color work into seven subsets: self-reflections, formalism, the vivid vernacular, documentation, The frame—the photograph is selected, not conceived. moral vision, enchantments, and fabricated fictions. Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Time—photographs are time exposures and describe discrete parcels of time. Lindquist-Cock, in 1985, looked specifically at another category of photographs, 6 Vantage point—photographs provide us new views of the world. landscapes, in Landscape as Photograph and subdivided that category into land- scape as God, fact, symbol, pure form, popular culture, concept, politics and pro- In 1978, with a traveling exhibition and in a book, Szarkowski proposed a break- paganda. In Fabrications: Staged, Altered, and Appropriated Photographs, Anne Hoy down for looking at photographs made since 1960: "mirrors and windows." divided recent photography into five categories: narrative tableaux, portraits and Although he presents mirrors and windows as the two poles of a continuum sell-portraits, still-life constructions, appropriated images and words, and manipu- between which photographs can be placed, he divides the photographs in the book lated prints and photo-collages. and the exhibition into two distinct groups rather than placing them along a con- ( ategorics are designed for different purposes, and they use various means to dis- tinuum. He aligns mirrors with the romantic tradition and windows with the realist tinguish photographs. The Time-Life great themes are distinguished by subject mat- tradition in literature and art: ter and are easy to use. The pictorialist and purist, or straight and manipulated, The romantic view is that the meanings of the world are dependent on our own categoi ies attend to photographic procedure and resulting photographic form.