Is a Photograph Meaningful Solely Because of the Context in Which It Is Deployed?

What makes something meaningful? What gives something meaning? Is it really context alone? Does this apply solely to photography? What makes photography different? Context is very much an evocative word in its own right, and to decipher its power upon photography we must first break apart all aspects of it. The context indicates the background, situation, framework, environment and the perspective of a photograph. Each element plays its own part in how we interpret and find meaning in images. For example a photograph of the figure within a science textbook would take on a completely different meaning to a photograph of a figure placed alone in a gallery (environment, background), or perhaps a photograph presented turned upside down would ask new questions (framework). Although context plays a huge part in determining what meaning we find in an image, I feel that an image will have meaning regardless of its placement, therefore the photograph has more overall possession of meaning than any environment it resides in.

I believe that “Photography is never a straightforward view on the world; the meanings of photographs remain unstable, depending on usage”1, but I do not believe that the photograph relies solely on its deployment to be significant. The photograph will always remain meaningful to someone, despite of its context, its meaning will just change and adjust. A photograph has the ability to hold endless expression within it, expressing all its different facets when displayed in varying environments, backgrounds, and times.

I feel that an image will hold meaning regardless of its context though changing circumstance will influence change in meaning. There is always a denoted message in an image, that regardless of where it is we can read and find meaning as individuals, there are universal understandings such as a smile, which signifies happiness. And there is always a certain knowledge to a photograph which we can read, for example a photograph of a cat sitting on a table and a bowl which is falling through the air tells us just that, but we can all add personal insight and knowledge to assume that the bowl is likely to brake when it hits the floor and we can all guess that the cat knocked it off, we can further assume that it is highlighting the cat is hungry and was looking for food, or perhaps highlighting the dangerous, mischievous curiosity of a cat, or purely a look at how the camera can catch a moment in time forever freezing a moment which in reality takes seconds to complete (a bowl falling of a table and hitting a floor), but none of the original assumptions are affected by context but by personal experience and knowledge, these ideas are only widened or reigned in through context. If the image is found in a children's book about a naughty cat called Skimbleshanks we will focus differently toward it than if it were placed in a technical photographic book highlighting how to freeze a moment in time (our focus would be on the bowl rather than the cat).

Context plays a huge part in how something is perceived and read, but does this theory not apply to everything? However perhaps it is more important related to photography as it has a power over image and its ease in manipulation of meaning. Many photographs are now displayed in contexts for which they were not originally intended. “The camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it yields is never its own”2. This is especially true of the commercial image

Changing views and perceptions in the world affect how we see everything, and different people in different cultures will perceive things differently. A good example that illustrates this point photographically, are the adverts for HSBC. There adverts consist of sequences of identical images connoted with words. For example one advert consists of a photograph of a tent in a natural sandy landscape with plants and the figure of a man lying inside the tent, this is followed by the rather unnatural mechanical image of the deck of a cruise ship with a pool and people sunbathing around it. These images are then repeated, and they read heaven, hell, hell, heaven. Highlighting how different people will find different feelings towards the different images and the ideas they conjure up. In my example it is the idea of holidays and how some people will see camping, at one with nature as heaven and the others see it as a dirty, tiresome chore like hell, and some will see the cruise as a sterile, limiting, chaotic hell, and others an exciting, relaxing, everything taken care of heaven. Not only does the advert highlight how different people from different backgrounds, cultures and environments will see these images differently, the text pushes us further