Message without a Coda: On the Rhetoric of Photographic Records

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the rhetoric of the photographic object in the context of the 3.11 disasters in Japan, where this particular object became essential for both commemorating the loss and communicating to future generations about the danger of a large-scale disaster. Through ethnography of the two different subcultures of photographic laboratory, the article documents various sign processes of the disaster-related photograph and argues that in the context of a sudden disaster, both the duty to remember the past and the hope for alternative trajectories for the future are grounded in the same regimented meaning of a particular object which nonetheless can be used to express different subjectivities. As a free-floating object, the photograph is by its nature antisemiotic in that it resists interpretation unless its visual persuasion is domesticated by “ethnometapragmatics,” that is, the highly coded cultural talk about the sociocultural, political, and historical significance of the image or a set of images.

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