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Photographs and Their Many Lives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
Extract
“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end?” asked Roland Barthes in his now-classic essay “Rhetoric of the image.” At first glance, Barthes’s questions might appear nonsensical, but as this discussion around the various uses and misuses of Evgenii Khaldei’s photographs of war-time Budapest demonstrates, the question of meaning and truth in photography is anything but simple. This is because the meaning of a photograph is shaped by a multitude of factors, both internal and external to the image itself, and because the photographic medium, more so than other visual practices, lends itself to expectations of verisimilitude that obscure the complex relationship that photographs have to reality that they purportedly record.
- Type
- Critical Forum: The Afterlife of Photographs
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017
References
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2. Ibid., 44. Barthes calls this message denotational: it refers to the viewer’s awareness of something “having-been-there” in front of the lens at some past moment. Barthes posits that denotational message co-exists with, and naturalizes the connotational, or symbolic, message that every photograph also contains.
3. William H.F. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844–46).
4. No one is more dismissive of the “myth of photographic truth” than practicing photographers who know better than anyone that any event could be photographed in a myriad different ways. For a fairly impatient re-statement that all images are, in one way or another, fictions, see Goldstein, Barry M., “All Photos Lie: Images as Data,” in Stanczak, Gregory C., ed., Visual Research Methods: Image, Society and Representation (London, 2007), 61–81 Google Scholar.
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9. In the interests of space, here and onward I concentrate on the Budapest ghetto photograph, with the understanding that Khaldei’s second photograph that Pastor discusses could be subjected to a similar analysis.
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