Response to The Picture Problem

While reading Gladwell’s The Picture Problem it became clear that although the sorts of photographs taken by radiologists and war personnel were and are meant to be highly detailed factual documentations of certain subjects (air strike locations and breast tissue), once human perception is involved the facts can become confused by each human perspective involved, and sometimes simply because the quality of an image is not very “good.” Of course, as an Art History major, I have been taught to be aware that every person has a different perspective when it comes to art (and anything visual for that matter). Each perspective will generate a different meaning of the visual, but it is often hard to be aware that even seemingly factual documentation of the sort addressed in the reading can also generate different meanings for separate individuals. I think that the fact that these cases were addressed is evidence that the ideas and debates from the 19^th century about the documentary aspects of photography (discussed in Wells) have been carried to the present, although they have definitely changed. By this I mean that they have turned into debates of how much factual evidence can be seen or interpreted from a photograph, and in Gladwell’s case, he addresses the “limits of looking” opposed to the perspective that photography granted limitless looking--at factual evidence; a perspective that many 19^th century people seemed to have. Baudelaire is a good example of someone with the second perspective, who saw photographs as a means to strengthen the validity of factual evidence already known (also mentioned in Wells). In my opinion, it is interesting to see how these questions have evolved up to the present.