If you show a photo of canine food to a dog, it wouldn’t salivate much less eat the picture. However, a mother who sees a snapshot of her dead son would cry. Only humans react emotionally and physiologically to a photograph.

Whenever I look at that sunrise photo I took one frigid morning last December in the Netherlands, I re-experience all the emotions associated with that image. Yes, that is a simple shot of the morning sun and the silhouette of some trees, but what else is it? The “what else is it” is a very important question if you are interested in knowing what makes an image meaningful and beautiful.

Seeing the sunrise as only a sunrise is a denotation, a literal interpretation. What the sunrise connotes, what it signifies, is what makes it memorable and meaningful. To me, the sunrise photo is a visual metaphor of how my weeklong stay with the Van Vlissingen family in the Netherlands brought about extraordinary joy to me last Christmas. And it never fails to prompt me to recall with such fondness a very dear friend who loves sunrises more than anything else in the universe. Thus when I showed her that picture it became a poetic statement of how I valued our friendship.

There are emotions and ideas that can only be expressed through photographic images. As such, an image is always subjective – it is best understood from the perspective of the artist.

What particularly excites me is to imagine what the artist wants to communicate through his/her photo. I try to examine all the available elements – color, framing, depth of field, texture, direction, movement, symmetry – and how these elicit certain personal feelings, ideas, and experiences. The pleasure I get from doing it is equivalent to listening to my most favorite music or to holding the hand of my loved one.

On a deeper level, personal imagery and inner experiences come into play when we look at photographic works of art. Only when a photo (regardless of quality, subject and format) triggers our memory, resonates emotions and evokes ideas can we experience it as something beautiful and meaningful.