I will tell you two short stories, now.
A man rides the train to the city every day for work. Each day his walk from the station to his office takes him past the same diner. He's never been inside. One day he glances in, as he does from time to time, and notices they've hired an extremely pretty young woman. A few days later he takes the early train, as he sometimes does, and has an extra twenty minutes to spare. He enters the diner and orders coffee, intending to make small talk with the young woman and see if he can charm her. The woman's manner while she serves him is, however, unmistakably closed and unwelcoming of conversation, albeit polite. Angry, he drinks half of the coffee, leaves a ten cent tip, and departs.
A man rides the train to the city every day for work. Each day his walk from the station to his office takes him past the same diner. He's never been inside, and has never really registered the diner's existence. One day he takes the early train, as he sometimes does, and has an extra twenty minutes to spare, and happens to notice the diner as more than background on this particular morning. He enters the diner and orders coffee. Taking a sip, he finds the coffee unpleasantly bitter, it's been sitting too hot for too long. He finds a dollar and enough change to pay for the coffee, plus a dime. His only other cash is twenties, and he's unwilling to ask the woman behind the counter to break a $20 so he can tip her more for a terrible cup of coffee. He leaves the dime for a tip, and departs.
Two quite different stories, with precisely the same observable facts. There are two unrelated remarks I'd like to make here. The first is that our governments are learning to lie to us in this way. They're not capable of reliably concealing the facts of the case, so they're substituting this kind of thing, and it works beautifully. Consider being alarmed. The second remark is that this also describes something about trame, that is is inherently malleable and variable. Trame can be taken as the story we make up to fit the facts of a picture, and there are at any rate cases where people might make up wildly different stories.
Throw in a hint, another tiny detail, and one or the other of the two stories we started with collapses. Thus also a title, a word, a caption, can collapse or open a whole world of interpretation of a photograph or photo essay.
I don't know what that means.
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