“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.
