Searching for meaning in photos

Paul Butzi is writing interesting commentary at Sources of Meaning:

[...] what I’ve discovered is that the meaning that emerges as I take a long series of photographs and print them and hang them on the wall and look at them over time - that meaning is not something that I knew, and put in the photos in some subconscious way, and later rediscovered through the photos. It’s new stuff - stuff I’ve never understood or noticed before.

I have similar experiences, although (being a novice photographer) I have ample examples of photos that never quite achieve a level of meaningfulness. These photos are (at best) documentary and no more.

At some point I was quite taken with the ideas of Daniel Dennett, for example the book “Consciousness Explained”, where (loosely recollected and paraphrased) the key idea is that the person “I” does not really exist, it is just an illusion produced by certain parts of the brain to explain things which happen in our mind.

Thus, from this viewpoint, the person who shoots a photo and the person who views the photo later on, are not really the same, they are only connected by a history of biological tissue and synaptical connections but not much more than that. From this biological viewpoint the discussion about “conscious” vs. “unconscious” decisions is irrelevant, because consciusness is an illusion produced in the theater of our mind to make us keep our sanity.

But coming back to the relation of reality to photographs, one of the key points is that there are many kinds of photographers. I commented an earlier posting by Paul Butzi as follows:

I feel that there is a type of photographer who has a preconceived notion of the pictures they want to take, and they view the world as a theater stage, and use lighting, elaborate costumes, make-up etc. to produce pictures which create a reality of their liking. But I guess there must be some kind of discovery there also.

I feel this kind of photography is more and more popular. Perhaps this is due to the example set by the media personalities and paparazzi - a way of posturing to the world. On the other hand, the reason may be that much (most?) of the photos people see are in advertisements, and thus the commercial use of photos starts to dominate other areas as well.