Pause, Click: Photography, an Introductory Reading

Abstract

Photographs are one of the most celebrated kinds of images. As a medium of representation, they arrest our attention and constantly confront us at different levels: emotional, cognitive, physical and interpersonal. The article primarily focuses on photographs as visual texts and how readers or viewers negotiate meanings from them. It attempts to analyze a set of photographs by employing the principles of critical hermeneutics. The task of hermeneutics is a continuous process to fundamentally interpret the photographs and give scope for different readings. Photography can be treated as a language, acquiring meaning through the cultural conventions, and conscious and unconscious processes, which cannot be merely reduced to subject matter, visual style and authorial intentions.