5 ways to interpret a photograph

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Around half of the world's population recognise these 7 iconic photographs. They include the moon landing, 9/11, Che Guevara, the naked 'napalm girl' running away, 'tank man' in Beijing's Tiananmen Square (1989), the six American soldiers raising a flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in 1945 and the image of famine in Sudan.

Only the way we look at them differs from country to country. Historian Rutger van der Hoeven researched this. We assume that an image speaks for itself, or that our interpretation is the same everywhere in the world, but that is not the case at all.

Where one person says: this is what hunger looks like, another says: this is a comment on inequality in the world and our inability to solve it.

Three thousand participants from twelve countries, with African and Arab countries missing because there were too few respondents, viewed the iconic photographs. They were people of different ages, educational backgrounds and political orientations.

1. Purely informative or documentary ('this is what war looks like');


2. As a practical tip ('don't throw food away');


3. An emotional appeal ('we need to protect our children better');


4. A moral judgement ('people are bad');


5. Or more categorically, this photograph stands for 'hunger' or 'terrorism'.

Italians recognised the iconic photographs best and also had the strongest emotional response to them. Japanese people recognised them least and were therefore affected least by the images they saw. They saw the photographs more as 'informative'.

The 9/11 photograph of the man jumping from the window of a skyscraper was also often not recognised in Japan. Some people wrote about it: This is what work pressure does to you.

Source: De Volkskrant

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