The Subject(iveness) of a Photo

My interpretation of Hartouni’s argument highlighted in the prompt is a two-part piece:

Part 1: I am going to make a generic, fairly base, and perhaps bold (maybe all three?) statement: An image’s purpose is to be an object that is looked at. If there’s an image and no one sees it, that image arguably does not matter. The image only gets a meaning when someone looks at it and assigns it a meaning. Assuming this to be true (which I am) any image—no matter what kind—is open to interpretation.

Part 2: Every image is framed or edited, even without trying to be. To explain this, I’m going to go with the example of photography because it is the easiest to apply. The photographer, for instance, decides what gets into the shot. S/he chooses what is allowed in the frame of focus and snaps the picture—containing some things and leaving out others. It is physically impossible to capture everything. There’s no technology that is capable of it.

Taking these last two paragraphs into account, I’d like to turn my attention towards a specific type of technology and the image it produces. The particular kind I’d like to explore is a type of medical or biological imaging technology. This allows the viewer to see the inside of a body. The reason I want to check out this type is because it’s scientific. It is commonly viewed as being objective and matter of fact. However, as mentioned in my interpretation of Hartouni’s argument, there’s no such thing.

To test out this idea, I’d like to take a look at a specific image:

Without knowing what this image is or what context it was taken in, a person is left to assign it a meaning. Without knowing anything, the viewer is left to see only the shapes, colors, and textures. You get an overall warm feeling from it because of all the red and yellows. You see some type of blue tube-ish figure. You notice its texture. There’s bubble-like surface. The blue appears to be coming out or going into the yellow thing. You see the texture of the yellow thing. It has a ton of tiny bumps on its surface. It comes off as something fairly abstract.

I asked a few friends what they thought it was and the answers they came up with were not even close to the real thing. I got: “A frog with water spewing out of its eye,” “A mosquito sucking out of something,” and “I have no idea.” Each person brought his or her own meaning. When I revealed what the image actually was I got a much different response. It ranged from “Ohhh” to “Are you doing something on abortion?”

When I told them what it was, I didn’t say anything about abortion. I simply said that it was a sperm entering an egg. I didn’t mention “baby,” “fetus,” or “life.” As soon my one friend knew what the photo was, the nature of her interpretation changed. It went from being something abstract to being something that was loaded with meaning. This particular friend has a fairly strong belief in God. As soon as she heard the words sperm and egg together, and saw that I (she knows I’m a fairly liberal person) was writing something she automatically assigned it a new significance.

This goes to show that even “scientific” and “objective” images aren’t so scientific or objective. I think that ultimately, Hartouni is asserting that particular type of argument. No matter how big the attempt to capture a matter-of-fact image, it is impossible. Either the way in which the image is framed (zoomed in, zoomed out, off center, etc) or the way in which a viewer approaches it makes multiple meanings possible and probable.

(Image is Lennart Nilsson's and was used courtesy of http://pics.photographer.ru/nonstop/pics/pictures/573/573605.jpg)