Visual Literacy

By now everyone knows that photographs do not tell simple truths. Especially if “truth” is defined as a state of certainty, a fixed point, euclidean, trigonometric. A point difficult to reach, but conclusive. Photographs are different. Photographs are polymorphously perverse entities. Protean data. Paradoxical both/and creatures. They resemble Tweedledum and Tweedledee standing at the crossroads in Wonderland, pointing in opposite directions, rolling their eyes and grinning fiendishly while Alice, as earnest as a historian, asks in which direction the truth, disguised as a white rabbit, went. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz talked about “deep structures” and “thick description,” the pursuit of meanings beneath meanings, arrived at by an intense study of fecund particulars. “Doing anthropology,” Geertz wrote, “is like trying to read a manuscript, foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries … written not in conventionalized graphs of sound, but in transient examples of shaped behavior.” The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in his heroic self-analysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, spoke of “manifest content” and “latent content.” “Manifest,” said Freud, is what the dreamer saw and heard, what he witnessed; “latent” is the “dream work” itself, its multiple meanings, condensed, displaced, transformed, and revised at the very moment, in the very act, of being remembered.1