The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning

Barry Mauer

continued . . .

Found photos don't elicit inferences the way Hollywood movies do; they are often more complex, obscure, and fragmentary. Yet found photographs, particularly family photographs, activate stereotypes because they often contain details that seem familiar, at least on first glance. As Ray mentions, inferences based on "the already read" (39) limit our reading of photographs—the relaxed clothing, the poses, and the poolside setting in the photograph to the right mark these women as "Friends on a vacation in Florida." Of course, I may be totally wrong and each sign I have read may mean any number of things.

Stereotyping involves selecting particular details for their value within a system of linguistic codes. Those details that don't fit within a system of codes might be conveniently ignored. Judgments based on stereotypes usually don't stand up to close analysis. But stereotypes, because they are convenient and satisfying, can prevent close analysis from ever occurring.

I am not immune to responses of voyeurism and stereotyping when looking at found photographs, but I am interested in discovering the point at which these responses break down and a different reading takes over, an interrogative reading that opens my own perceptual apparatus to difficult questions. Found photographs present a mystery and a challenge to me. That challenge is to see the world differently. As I have learned from semiotics, it is possible, maybe even desirable, to perceive the world as a system of signs and meaning produced by human history and culture, but it is also possible to see it as a swarm of illegible details that resist meaning. The obscure details within found photographs present us with the limits of meaning.

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