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.
Photography indeed entices my being into the realms of a well perceived imagery- too vivid not to be pursued to its purest perception. How the camera captures the subject is best attained via constant awareness of the details, which can be achieved through proper balance of purpose and objective by the eye that focuses it.
This is a question which I continuously face as a photographer. It really needs to be broken down into main parts: What makes an image meaningful locally, and what makes an image meaningful non-locally. You provided two examples which illustrate this distinction; the shot of a sunset which elicits memories and is a token between you and your hosts, and the photo of a dying child. Now here is where things get interesting, because a sunset can also have non-local meaning, (as sunsets have a universal appeal), and the dying child will have greater meaning to the relatives of the child.
As a photographer, I almost always want to capture and create images which will have wider appeal and elicit more powerful states in the viewer. So what gives an image that appeal? How do I make the distinction between the appeal which will cause reaction in a wider audience, and one which is merely affecting my state because of “other factors”? Parsing this out while engaging in the creative act of imagining the final form keeps me fully engaged while making an image.
Things which I work on to improve the number of meaningful images include: Reading more about composition, looking at images which I and others find meaningful, (and then analyzing why it elicits an emotional reaction, and how that reaction is affected by changes to framing, perspective, colour and tone.) It is an ongoing journey and learning curve which I particularly like because it is both inner (introspective), and outer (social and analytical). It happens at every step of the creative process from first recognizing the raw material which may become a potent image, and then exercising craft at every step in the process to the creation of the final image.