Photography Reading - "How Do We Read a Photograph?"

Whenever we look at a photographic image we engage in a series of complex readings which relate as much to the expectations and assumptions that we bring to the image as to the photographic subject itself. Indeed, rather than the notion of looking, which suggests a passive act of recognition, we need to insist tat we read a photograph, not as an image, but as a text.

This text contains an image "Identical Twins" by Diane Arbus, and it picks apart how we are supposed to 'read' the image. I quite like the image itself; there are two little girls around the age of 7, they are dressed the same and their hair is done the same, but one isn't smiling while her twin sister is. We then start to notice all the other small details and find that while they are identical twins, they are very different.

The text includes a few more images and talks about how to read them, but I found the first example to be the one that speaks the most to me.