As a documentary photographer I have to strongly disagree. The choice of subject, what the photographer chooses to include or edit out, point of focus all of these things are strong statements.
When you edit, etc, are you making choices based on your own disposition, reactions, etc, or are you inferring what the reactions will be of the third parties who will view them? If the latter, who are the third parties?
I don't believe photographs are blank slates onto which a viewer projects their beliefs ...
Of course they are. Nothing has meaning, other than to the person regarding it, and the meaning it has for them depends entirely on their particular life experience. If I say "arfle, barfle, gloop" to you, what do I mean?
... though I do strive to create images which allows the viewer to bring their own background to their interpretation of my work.
It is not case of allowing them - they will do precisely that anyway. Don't believe me? Consider the converse - you show a picture to someone and tell them that they're
not allowed to bring their own background to their interpretation. What are they expected to do? Whip out their crystal ball and somehow intuit what's in
your mind?
But the point of my work, and that of many other photojournalists, is to raise questions and challenge preconceptions. How can we do that if "photographs say nothing?"
Obvious - you assume that your visual expression of ideas, manifest in a photograph, will be interpreted in the way that you seek because we are not disparate individuals with completely unrelated life experiences - there are parallels and similarities. To communicate an idea by means of a photograph presupposes that the photographer knows how the viewer will interpret the image.
We do this sort of thing with language all the time. You, I, and others, are doing it now, here in this thread. The difference is that language is far more sophisticated than the somewhat random empirical associations that each individual might have with the content of a photograph. Language is also interactive - I can tell from your posts that you understand English, and there is thus a good chance that you will understand my posts, written in English, as well.
One could argue that you're just hitting random keys on your keyboard, that I am doing the same, and, by an amazing coincidence, our random key-tappings come together to make readable, sensible English discourse. But a small dose of pragmatism leads one to infer that we probably are writing English and engaging in discourse - no infinite number of monkeys banging out the works of Shakespeare here.
How does interaction, or conceptual transfer or exchange, in a 'language of images' work? Is it anything like as precise or reliable as the written word? If you show me a picture, and I 'respond' with a picture, can you tell from my picture that I understood, or correctly interpreted the meaning of, yours?
