Abstract

The article aims to conceptualize both representation and understanding in photography, an activity whose main goal consist in elucidating the process through which the photographic image is constructed on a partial isomorphism relationship, as well as in enabling to understand a meaningful message. We appeal to Nelson Goodman’s account, according to which such a construction is based on data provided by the image, on the one hand, and by viewer’s knowledge, on the other. Given that those sources give viewer a new knowledge about the world and that the inferential processes depend upon a general theory of symbols, we both show and account for the inferential procedure that raises from the photographic ‘information’ in several case-studies taken from Henry Cartier-Bresson’s work.