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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end?” asked Roland Barthes in his now-classic essay “Rhetoric of the image.” At first glance, Barthes’s questions might appear nonsensical, but as this discussion around the various uses and misuses of Evgenii Khaldei’s photographs of war-time Budapest demonstrates, the question of meaning and truth in photography is anything but simple. This is because the meaning of a photograph is shaped by a multitude of factors, both internal and external to the image itself, and because the photographic medium, more so than other visual practices, lends itself to expectations of verisimilitude that obscure the complex relationship that photographs have to reality that they purportedly record.
1. Barthes, Roland, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977), 32 Google Scholar.
2. Ibid., 44. Barthes calls this message denotational: it refers to the viewer’s awareness of something “having-been-there” in front of the lens at some past moment. Barthes posits that denotational message co-exists with, and naturalizes the connotational, or symbolic, message that every photograph also contains.
3. William H.F. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844–46).
4. No one is more dismissive of the “myth of photographic truth” than practicing photographers who know better than anyone that any event could be photographed in a myriad different ways. For a fairly impatient re-statement that all images are, in one way or another, fictions, see Goldstein, Barry M., “All Photos Lie: Images as Data,” in Stanczak, Gregory C., ed., Visual Research Methods: Image, Society and Representation (London, 2007), 61–81 Google Scholar.
5. Shneer, David, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar.
6. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 148.
7. Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, 1993), 63 Google Scholar.
8. Ibid., 63.
9. In the interests of space, here and onward I concentrate on the Budapest ghetto photograph, with the understanding that Khaldei’s second photograph that Pastor discusses could be subjected to a similar analysis.
10. These are the kinds of uses that Burke, Peter mentions in Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar.
11. Ibid., 10.
12. Barthes, Roland, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977), 38–39 Google Scholar (italics in the original).
13. Cornelius, Deborah S., Kutyaszorítóban. Magyarország és a II. világháború [In a Quagmire: Hungary and World War II] (Budapest, 2015), 421 Google Scholar.
14. It is worth noting that the same error was not made in the English version of Cornelius’s book, suggesting that the mechanism of verification and assessment of the manuscript may have functioned quite differently in the Hungarian context.
15. For some examples, see www.cloudmind.info/violence-against-women-the-high-cost-of-war-paid-by-women/ (last accessed November 15, 2016); www.exulanten.com/humanloot.html (last accessed November 15, 2016); https://rodoh.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1346 (last accessed November 15, 2016).
16. van Dijck, José, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford, 2013), 154 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17. Note that arousal of emotions is one function in which images are supremely effective even as they may falter as channels of communication or expression. See Gombrich, Ernst, “The visual image: Its place in communication,” in Woodfield, Richard, ed., The Essential Gombrich (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, and for a more up-to-date discussion of the emotional appeal and symbolic potential of news images, see Zelizer, Barbie, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.
18. Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim, Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (Berkeley, 2016), 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19. See Zelizer, Barbie, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago, 1998)Google Scholar.
20. Ibid., 118.
21. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 39. Italics in the original.
22. For a detailed discussion of such transformations of Khaldei’s and Dmitri Baltermants’s photographs after the war, see Shneer, David, “Picturing Grief: Soviet Holocaust Photography at the Intersection of History and Memory,” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (Feb. 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23. Becker, Howard, “Do Photographs Tell the Truth?,” in Doing Things Together (Evanston, 1986), 279 Google Scholar.