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Categories and Comparisons: How We Find Meaning in Photographs
Author(s) -
Becker Howard S.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
visual anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.346
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1548-7458
pISSN - 1058-7187
DOI - 10.1525/var.1998.14.2.3
Subject(s) - meaning (existential) , citation , linguistics , computer science , library science , epistemology , philosophy
Photographers and social scientists share this problem: how to arrange large amounts of material (photographs or qualitative and quantitative social science data) so that they communicate the analyst's understanding of the situation studied to a reader or viewer willing to study the arrangement seriously? A comparison that will seem unlikely to most readers—between the making and reading of sequences of documentary photographs and the making and reading of statistical tables—reveals the crucial analytic role of the construction of categories of comparison by both the maker and reader of such representations. Suppose that I have made a large number of photographs—a serious documentary photographer would make many thousands of exposures pursuing a big topic. I have edited them: selected those images I think best convey the ideas I have arrived at about my topic as I went about making them. How can I arrange all this stuff, put it together so that it communicates something I want to communicate to the people I want to communicate it to (and, of course, communicate what they want me to communicate well enough that they will pay attention to my work)? Walker Evans had just this problem when he created American Photographs (Evans 1988 [1938]) from images he had made over a period of several years, all over the eastern United States, south and north (the farthest west he got was New Orleans): New York, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Alabama, and elsewhere. (Not all in the United States; you have to interpret the title generously, since three of the pictures were made in Havana). He wasn't completely clear about what he was after when he made all these pictures. According to a profound student of his work, Alan Trachtenberg, Evans was trying to answer the questions that the Great Depression had raised for a lot of American intellectuals: