How is photography examined cross-culturally?
How can we understand the link between the photographer, the photo, reality and the receivers?
What properties do cultures use to index and conceptualize the meanings from photos?
What does a photo allow us to view and what meanings do we discover or bring to the photo?
Christopher Pinney's article details some of the ways photography is believed to engage with culture. It views the cultural practices used and the ability for photography to represent reality or cause a reflection of identity and the cultural subjective itself.
In the West, photography acts as a mirror for us to dwell on self consciousness. In central India, photography is a medium that includes painting and chromolithography and the photo is used in the same ways that ancient representation is. Thus, Pinney believes it is not "modern."
Foucault says that photography maintains to function as a reflection of the culture and politics at the time. While Foucault is on the right track, Ginzburg offers the idea that the sign and its referent are believed to be fixed but isn't. He notes that epistemes change and the information a viewer brings to a photo in one era is drastically different for a viewer in another era. Therefore there is no formal link between qualities and effect. The study of what causes transformative meaning in a photo should be looked at through "sophisticated analysis"
Because of the fixity of a photographgh it is easy to assume that there are strict connections between a signs an their referents, however, Photography is a rich form of art with many perspectives to discover. The photographer's motivations and ideologies plus the lens inability to deiscriminate offersa rich landcape and multiple codes of information. This allows presumably for the viewer to "look past" to find another inherent and sometimes subversive meaning about the politics of the time of the photo. Looking past is the transformative or transedental quality of the photo (for the West.)
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