This essay uses examples of digital press photographs to discuss the conditions under which an image can be classified as visually true. While image authenticity is understood as a subjective attribution of credibility to a photograph, the visual truth refers to an objective nature. The analysis concludes that the evaluation of authenticity and truth of photographs must take different forms of manipulation before and during recording, as well as subsequent image processing, into account. Lastly, it is demonstrated that visual truth is unreachable.
In the commemorative year 2014, a German governmental organisation presented an exhibition to the public. Most of the exhibits were documentary photographs. For Political Scientists who are interested in politics of history in general and the visual representation of history in particular a search for an appropriate theoretical and methodological approach started. While the interdisciplinary discourse is characterized by the unproductive polarity between realists (especially in Political Science and History) and constructivists (especially in Cultural Studies) not only since the iconic and pictorial turn respectively, the article sounds out a perspective in-between. Contrary to the mainstream, who handles Roland Barthes as a realist, the starting point here is a post-constructivist reading of his phototheoretical works. It allows neither to transfigure photographs as permeable media nor to misconceive their power of evidence as a mere coding. In addition, Barthes’ approach provides some helpful instruments to deconstruct visually organised myths within the framework of a historical exhibition.
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the picture Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge (2016). Both art-historical gender studies, as well as iconographic aspects shall be applied to the above-mentioned picture and other comparative photographs within the subchapters »Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge as a reproduction of traditional perceptions of femininity« and »Political Staging of femininity in the 20th and 21st century«. The content and consequential impact pictures have, constitute the collective visual memory of a society. This visual memory influences our notion of culture and is the reason behind the reproduction of collective attribution of meaning. In the following, we will elaborate on the general structure of Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge, its contents and the interpretation of these in the light of gender studies. In order to achieve representative results, we will consult comparative photographs from the 20th and 21st century, which feature similar iconographic aspects in their portrayal. As a result, we will prove that these pictures – despite their iconographic portrayal – shall not be seen as icons of feminism. Instead, we want to show that their impact evolves because of the attribution of meaning – which says that women are the weaker sex – in the collective memory. Previous interpretations of the pictures shall be challenged and a new interpretation illustrated, which so far was neglected in the social and media discourse.
