Pluto wrote:What is a photograph, how are photos used today in our hyper modern societies. This thread to be all about the photo. I will start by posting a link to a written piece I read recently, it is about the photo and also its use, so it fits here quite well.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... otests-lie
I think this is similar to asking, “What is truth/beauty/love/happiness/freedom …”
The potential ‘problem’ (controversy?) lies hidden in the present tense of the verb-to-be, ‘is’. We use that verb for all sorts of very different contextual purposes. We have little choice in the matter. But all of those pragmatic/imaginative purposes involve creating the irresistible illusion of permanence and actuality. We cannot avoid this. It’s in the nature of having evolved with this beguiling/pernicious capacity for so-called ‘semantic communication’. (“I speak, therefore I’m telling you.”)
The verb-to-be is indispensable for stating “pure facts”. (What is your name? What is the time? Where is my car?) No immediately apparent ambiguity there. Unless … Well, there is always a plethora of other meanings available, of course. But we know, don’t we, if we’re old and experienced (wise?) enough, how to sail around those.
But, because of these commonly understood statements about “the way things are”, we are much too easily (automatically) inclined to assume that a question such as, “What is a photograph?” must require (deserves?) a similarly straight-forward “statement of fact”.
Similarly, if someone in the high street who looks ‘suave, super-confident and professional’ shoves what looks like a microphone under your nose and asks you for “your opinion” about X, you are obviously expected to assume that the question deserves a coherent (therefore correct) “answer”.
Of course, one’s education is not considered complete unless one knows John Keats[*] has long established (once and for all) what “truth and beauty are” (synonymous). And, as we all know, to the point of emotional exhaustion, “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”. [First recorded in 3rd century BC. Only in its current form in the 19th century. Way back in 1588, John Lyly wrote in his ‘Euphues and his England’: "...as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote.”]
So. Is a picture really “worth a thousand words”? Most certainly. Of course. Without the shadow of a doubt. Provided that you believe (nothing else really matters, after all) that the image “says” more-or-less-precisely (oxymoron?) what you “want it to say”.
Whether it does or not, must ultimately be left up to the gods … and/or the judiciary.
[*] Ode on a Grecian Urn. [Which predictably evoked that old play-on-words for which the English language, more than any other, is renown: “What’s a Greek urn?” The contraction can be as readily understood as, “what is a Greek urn?” as “what does a Greek earn?” It’s that fundamental English propensity for potential ambiguity, that is mostly responsible for the near-riots in forums such as this.
