What Can We Say About Context?

I am obviously very interested in the way context alters our perception of a photograph. Readers who have been with me for more than a few days know that my theory of how we read photographs proceeds roughly thus: when we look at a photo, we metaphorically enter the photograph, and from that vantage point mentally construct a world to go around the things we see in the picture.

We build this world from 1) the things we see in the picture, 2) the things we know about the picture, and 3) our own selves.

The second one is what I broadly refer to as "context" and of course the process of world-building involves all three elements sloshing around in a sort of incoherent brew.

To critically read a photo, we should gather as much context as possible, because we're interested in all possible personal readings, and we don't know which bits of context which people have. So, best to gather it all up.

To read a photograph personally, though, is to enter the world of the photograph with whatever knowledge we have on hand. We construct a world, and interpret the meaning of the picture in the light of that imagined world.

If we know very little, it is as if we enter a darkened room, with only the small area of the photograph illuminated. We populate the room with things of our own imagining, and it gradually brighten, filled with whatever we have imagined fits with the photograph. If we know a great deal, the room starts out with various areas brightly lit, filled with things we know (or think we know). Perhaps we're only filling in a few gaps here and there from our imagining — but always more than we think we are. We think the world we've built is true, or truer than it is, rather than imagined.

When I went to some effort to fill in the darkened room (in this case, a literal dark room) around a black prisoner dancing, I uncovered a lot of detail. Different people, furniture, a washroom, the relationship of many objects to one another, and so on. It may well have felt like there was some deeper understanding that must inevitably arise.

In the end, though, the emotions of the people in the frame remain obscure, perhaps slightly illuminated, but ultimately unknowable, and so often it is the emotions and thoughts of the people that matter.