Our Own Interpretations

One quote that really stands out to me involving photography was made by Keith Davis (2016), who says, “A photograph is not concerned with what the world looks like; it is an insigne of what another human being has felt about the world, what another person wants the world to mean.” What he is basically saying here is that these haunting images of past events that we see are what we interpret them to be. For example, look at the photo of a burnt out car below. As far as we can tell from the photo, it’s just a seemingly abandoned, burnt out car; while this is haunting due to what it could mean (deaths), we don’t have any context for what it is, or what it actually depicts. Maybe it was a car accident, but even then, we don’t know when it happened, or how. All this is stuff people might assume, however, we will never know for sure unless we were actually there at the time. As Davis so accurately put it, photographs can really only act as one

part of memory – without context, they can skew events, and make them completely different from how they actually were.