Photograph Validity

I thought that Morris’ editorial offered an interpretation of the way we perceive ‘caption-less’ photographs that questions the validity of every photograph I’ve ever seen, especially those from my childhood. There are so many pictures that have sparked memories for me in a way. By this I mean there would be no memory if not for the photograph. I have spent hours sifting through the remnants from my past in photo boxes labeled “Family” or “Bailey” and that’s about the extent of the caption. The rest is left for me to interpret. 

In his editorial, Morris claims, “All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.” I think this an extremely complex point he is making. In a way, photographs are always true; they are snapshots in time and illustrate exactly how something/someone looked at a given point (disregarding all the photoshopped pictures nowadays.) Photographs are, a lot of time, evidence of a certain event. This all kind of reminds me of the saying that floats around the internet: “Pics or it didn’t happen.” 

However, the point Morris is trying to get across is that without captions, we have no idea what a photograph is even of. Think about baby pictures of yourself. In my opinion, literally every single baby looks the exact same. So how am I supposed to tell that that’s me in a picture? Today, I can take my mom’s word for it. But two hundred years from now, how is anybody going to be able to tell?

Take the iconic image from the Great Depression of the migrant mother as an example. Even the photographer admits to knowing very little about this woman, not even her name. Yet, we view this photograph as describing life during the Depression very accurately.