Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight
depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context
in which it is seen: thus Smith’s Minamata photographs will seem different on a
contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in
a photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book, on a living-room
wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but
none can secure their meaning. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the
meaning is the use—so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the
presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the
very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths
which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.
