Worth a Thousand Meanings

Limited Yet Expanding

In Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, the reader is asked to think about how our engagement with a photograph affects ours perception and understanding of what an image represents. In this insightful essay, Sontag evaluates the use of images and how the interpretation can either be heavily influenced by the context or the effect of our limitless imagination. In doing so, Sontag challenges how we interpret our own relationship to photography with our perspective on representation and reality.

According to Sontag, photography possesses an inherent tension between objectivity and subjectivity. Photography gives the information of what worth to be interpreted rather what is really there. Objectivity claim in a photograph is subjective and is a suggestion filtered by the mind and eye. For photographs are easily accepted as fact, even though truth cannot be established without context or an understanding. Which is composed of both the perspective of the photographer and the interpretation that lies with the identity of the viewer. Sontag remarks, "A photograph is not supposed to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. " (47) With that said, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency which can lead out the photographer and the point of view that they try to get across.

The interpretation of photography forms the relationship between the evidentiary guise of the image and subjective interpretation of its meaning. Sontag discusses the importance of context for viewing a photograph by first focusing on the identity of the viewer, then the added narrative of writers or editors. Captions create context for a photograph, without which it is difficult to determine what the photograph is about, especially if it's a snapshot of a larger piece. Photographs without context are deceiving and one never fully understands anything from just a plan photograph. Pictures can be nice to look at, and we can infer from them what we like, but the picture can't tell us what it is, it can't explain to us the symbolism or far fetched meaning that lies behind it. As Sontag remarks, "all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions," (10)

By simply looking at a picture we cannot learn anything about or understand the world, but the image never the less has the power to heal and help so many. There is no denying that photography does have it own positive qualities. Recognizing photography's ability to fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the past and present is a characteristic in which Sontag says is limiting. However, without pictures our minds would be blank canvases with no outlet. Photography allows us to paint a picture in an empty place in need of light. For photographs give certain images worth and that worth is placed according to the