Exercise 5.6 Context and meaning

The exercise is to read John A Walker's essay 'Context as a Determinant of Photogpraphic Meaning' and add some personal reflections.

A photograph is contextualized by the location in which it is viewed, and relocating the image results in a change of context, and therefore its meaning.  Context itself can change: it can be media, socio-historical, architectural, for instance. There is a physical sense of context - where the image is situated - and a mental one, a more subtle context of why the image is situated where it is. In semiotic terms, context adds the signified to the signifier to make a sign. 

The advance of technology means photographs (and thereby to an extent any artistic work that can be photographed) loss any sense of identity coupled to a specific location; they can be viewed in a gallery, on a wall, in an album, online in a social media context or in an online gallery. The idea of  photograph being internalized by a mount, being self contained, is moribund.

Walker contends there is a life to a photograph, as it moves through time and space from context to context. Jo Spence transposed images of family from the private sphere of a family album to the public sphere of a gallery, adding images from advertisments to show the stereotyping of women within specific genres of photography.

Photographs have meaning for someone and therefore must account for Gombrich's 'beholder's share', in crude terms the already primed emotional and intellectual baggage with which people approach works of art. It is not entirely an individual experience as people have much that is shared: language, social norms, cultural identity, for example. As Walker points out: "Context is a troublesome determinant of meaning for artists because so often it lies outside their control."

This is a thoughtful analysis, that is quite prescient. Walker wrote before the explosion of digital imagery that was covered in Assignment 4, but he was already aware of the plethora of imagery even nearly 40 years ago, when he wrote:

 "It is, however, problematic to judge the impact of a single image when we are exposed to a veritable flood tide of visual imagery daily,...."