What the moralists are demanding from a photograph is that it do what no
photograph can ever do—speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is
expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one
interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is
attached. And the caption-glove slips on and off so easily. It cannot prevent
any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is
intended to support from being undermined by the plurality of meanings that
every photograph carries, or from being qualified by the acquisitive mentality
implicit in all picture-taking—and picture-collecting—and by the aesthetic
relation to their subjects which all photographs inevitably propose.
