Images and Captions

Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning. . . . The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. And the caption-glove slips on and off so easily.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 108-109
When photographs of the Civil War were published, American Studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg tells us that one commentator proclaimed,"These vivid pictures bring past history into the present tense." But, Trachtenberg reminds us,
[P]ictures demand captions . . . Somewhere between what the lens depicts and what the caption interprets, a mental picture intervenes, a cultural ideology defining what and how to see, what to recognize as significant. To recover the Civil War photographs as history requires, then, that we first bring unacknowledged mental pictures into focus. (From Reading American Photographs, 80)
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