I admit, I hadn't truly considered the subjective nature of some of the more famous historical photographs, prior to reading this article: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/iib.html
In particular, I found the notion that assigning an "About" to images with a complexity of meaning to them is an extremely tenuous activity, rather than an aggregate one of assigning each meaning to it, a fascinating one. With most photography and art, barring that in which abstraction obscures it, the "Of" attribute is generally clear. But even in a photo with the clearest "Of" quality to it, without a statement of intent from the author, it can be difficult to make a determination what it's "About."
Aboutness can be captured within the archive at large ... by that, I mean that the Bryant Museum has plenty of resources talking "about" what happened in each game, so trying to capture what every football image is "about" would in many ways be redundant of existing info. What we need to do is somehow link from the image to the relevant (point in a) story. The art images don't have these same linking possibilities methinks!
ReplyDelete--Dr. MacCall