Addendum to Previous

I feel as if I can usefully expand on a point made in the previous remarks, and a comment from Mr. Chisholm seems to confirm that!

Suppose I were dropped onto a street corner in Mumbai, right now, at this instant.

I would interpret all I see and experience in terms of who I am at this moment. Much of the speech would be meaningless to me, probably a lot of the gesture and body language would evade me as well. Signs, movements, everything, I would see and try to make sense of as only myself, now.

If then I lived in Mumbai for a year, or ten, I might absorb at least some elements of the local culture. The city and its inhabitants would shape me, I would grow and learn. That same street corner would read to me quite differently. I can't tell you in detail, but I know it would.

In the same way, a book can shape the reader a little, can give the reader necessary background, "culture" in some very broad sense, that enables the reader to make sense of the book. In a way that is the point of a book. A movie can do the same thing, albeit usually in a smaller way.

A photograph is like being dropped into a street corner. You cannot really become more, and then make sense of it, except through forces outside the photo. Being "in" the photo you have only yourself as you are now, to make sense of it. This doesn't mean you cannot learn things, you cannot enlarge yourself, by looking at a photo. But you do so on the terms of yourself as you are now.

I'm not sure if this is a matter of degree or kind.

I'm not sure to what extent a photo book is like a movie, and to what extent it's like a photo.

I do know, or at least I believe, that you can surround a photograph with material, say a block of text, that might shape the reader, might "expand your culture" in such a way as to make different sense of the photo. In some sense, this is merely contextualizing, of course.

In a sense, this is all just a way of thinking about contextualizing photographs, but the point is that the photo in and of itself is an instant, and you perceive it in terms of who you are right now, at the moment you look at it. A photograph does not unfold over time, you cannot meaningfully become in the process of looking at a photo. You can only be.

As Mr. Chisholm remarks, this is as much a limitation of us as of the photo! We are when we look at the picture, and that present being is all we have, all we can bring. Reading a book, we become, we change, we are different at the end of the book.

Nevertheless...

It does feel like a photograph ought to change us, though? I look, I see some new piece of information, I am different. Then I continue to look at the photo, as that different person. Do I make sense of it anew? Do endlessly spin, re-reading, changing, and re-reading again? I don't think so. Perhaps I converge in an instant on a subtly different me and see the photo in those terms, and that's end?

Is it, in the end, the same as reading a book, but in the small, and in an instant?