Any puzzle aficionado knows it’s easier to solve a jigsaw puzzle with the lid of the box sitting in front of you. It’s even considered cheating in some circles. But no cheating here; I can barely tell what the pieces look like. Before it’s clear which pieces go where, I must understand the way they fit together. I need to learn the logic of these images.
Here are the challenges:
1) Determining the subject of the image:
Just as any given image is potentially “about” any number of things, any given image is also more about some things than about others. Every viewer brings their own experience and expectations to bear upon any encounter (they both read and write meaning individually), but there is no simple way to separate the array of appropriate meanings from the array of inappropriate readings. Embracing a purely personal and subjective reading may represent the only solution here.
The available categories also seem to strongly affect the apparent subject of the images. For the sake of organization, and contributing factors like selective perception and relative cognitive salience, I will be more likely to align the subject of an image with those apparently similar to it.
What about multiple subjects? A preference for the abstract or the specific, the metaphorical or the literal? What role does composition and perspective play?
2) Determining the nature of the representation:
Images that contain representations of other images within their borders present a challenge. When are we looking at an image of an image rather than the initial image itself? Which is the original and which is the copy when everything is digital? What cues or signifiers can reliably separate the original from the secondary representation?
If the image has an exterior “frame” in which to situate it, the image is a representation of an image. Without a “frame” the image is determined to represent itself. Determining what constitutes the “frame” is where things get a little tricky.
A frame here is anything that clearly suggests the image is situated in another context than the digital form presented. This includes: a physical picture frame, a gallery environment, strong secondary graphical qualities (i.e. magazine layout elements, but not photographer credits) and any borders around the primary visual material that point to the physical print that has been translated into a digital format.
Things get really tricky in those instances where the original/reproduction division is undecipherable. This includes the realistic, but stylized museum postcard (victoria.jpg) and the image of a woman holding another image (photo 01.jpg) which appears to be scanned from a source rather than derived from a lens. Here the context from which the image is taken becomes the frame, even if no frame is visually apparent in the image.
3) Determining the intention of the image maker:
I can’t speak with any certainty about the author of any of these 100 images (other than perhaps Vid, if we accept his status as contributor of this peculiar fonds). Even if I were aware of the authors, and more, knew them personally, I would still have a difficult time discerning “true” intention (I’ll cite Andy Warhol as somewhat of an unreliable provocateur when ostensibly describing his “intention”). To determine intention is to open up the extremely tenuous binaries that haunt photography. Professional vs. Amateur, Public vs. Private, Artistic vs. Casual, Enduring vs. Ephemeral, Monumental vs. Incidental, Purposeful vs. Frivolous, Informative vs. Obfuscatory…etc.
Archives are puzzling.
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