Inside vs. outside meaning in family photographs

Abstract

This article deals with a unique problem posed by photographs. Because they provide only silent fragments of visual data, interpretation is largely a product of the viewer's imagination. This creates a rift in how a photograph is read by the people who participated in making it and the disconnected viewer who examines the mute scene at a later date. The terms “inside” and “outside” meaning are used to describe this difference in the ability to “understand” a photograph. The author uses his own family photographs to explore the differences in the surface portrayal of a photograph's contents and the underlying meaning as understood by the photograph's inhabitants.