What We Bring

Take a look at this picture here, to start with:

I'll give the context after the jump.



This picture comes to us by way of Lewis Bush over at disphotic. It's a picture from a guy named Muhammed Muheisen, who's got a collection of pictures of refugees in the Netherlands being housed in former jails. Follow the link from Lewis' post if you like, there is a bit of variety in the photos.

Now what's interesting to me, here, is a couple of the remarks Lewis makes about this specific picture:

The tiered walkways and identical doorways behind him makes clear this is an institution, specifically a prison and by no means a modern one.

But the unintended, unspoken message of employing such a building for such a purpose also seems inescapable, [...]

What this particular picture says to me, the way I instantly read it, is "motel". I've stayed in any number of motels (and hotels, oddly enough) with almost this exact architecture. Here, for instance, the interior of quite a decent hotel in the heart of San Francisco, the Hyatt at Market and Embarcadero. Replace the ugly sculpture and fountain with a basketball court, and you're got Lewis' "obviously a jail" design almost spot on.

Now the point isn't really that Lewis is a doofus and a blowhard, the point is that what he sees and what I see, in the very same picture, are completely different. Lewis is making quite a bit of hay commenting on the plight of the refugees from Syria and what a bunch of dickheads the Euros are. And that's all well and good, that's probably a drum that needs beating.

Still, where he sees "inescapable subtext" I see "hotel".

Virtually every other picture in Muheisen photo essay makes it more clear that this thing is a prison, so probably Lewis was polluted by that context. Whether he then found Panopticon on wikipedia, or knew about it in advance I do not venture to guess, but connect the photo essay to the idea he did.

I think he selected this picture, the least jail-specific of the lot, because he could also connect it to classical paintings via the man's pose, and that had to feel pretty good.

Regardless, we see a couple of things:

What we bring with us can profoundly affect what we take away from a photograph. We see it, the photo contains truth, which we perceive, and we are therefore convinced that what we see is both true and obvious.

This includes the context carried by a photo essay. We skim the whole thing, and the whole alters, perhaps, how we see each individual picture. Lewis, having seen closeups of heavy steel doors, cannot escape the perception that his selected frame is obviously a prison when, to me, it is obviously a hotel. I have not seen the steel doors.

And this finally brings us around to the value of multiple pictures. A single picture can only show us so much. Multiples can show us more. One picture can give us a detail (a heavy steel door) without much context, but which then renders the wide frame (a "hotel") quite differently, and perhaps more truthfully.

Or, let us be honest, untruthfully.