A “good” photograph

Is it “good”? Technically, it’s OK–comprehensible, decent colour, decent resolution.  The family doesn’t look hysterically happy; everyone seems a little introspective by  contemporary standards.. But it’s from 1947–probably the shot for the Christmas card.

Another possible criterion: Is it “true”?  There’s no final answer, but everything anyone could say about that comes from some other kind of information storage–Mom didn’t really knit that much, certainly not in a suit and heels with the family assembled.  In fact the family would probably only be assembled, dressed up and peaceful, for their photograph,

Flusser is always arguing that the meaning we take from photographs is very rarely related to their status as records of the past.  They usually don’t “take you back”.  Rather, they project you forward (or outward, I’d add): they say “this is possible”.   I was born into this family about 9 months after the photograph was taken, so there is no question of being “taken back”.

Whether it’s “good” or not would be, for Flusser, an aesthetic decision. He thinks of a freely-made (not by a robot) photograph as a gesture–a frozen gesture.  The decision about whether it is “good” or not would not hinge on the “truth” or technical precision of the image, but on whether that gesture is empty or full — for us, the viewers: can we recognize it as the–arrested– movement of another human being exercising his or her freedom? Can we, therefore, respond, freely? Many things about the image are controlled. The family commissioned a photographer and issued some instructions. There are conventions about family photographs in general and Christmas cards in particular. But there is freedom, too (at least for the commissioning parents). I can read choices of clothes and setting and gesture. And because I can do that, I can respond to the photograph now, admire or detest it, evaluate the gesture of making it. It is not empty. It facilitates the exercise of freedom. It is good.