And this is precisely what still photographs allow us to do. In other media the message-sender gives the receiver as little opportunity as possible to reshape the message to the receiver's own comfort or interest. The sender tries not only to pre-package his message but to control his audience's involvement with it. We can now build a new model for photography in which the photograph contains information but no meaning. The photograph is the product of the photographer-subject interaction and photography itself is a social transaction among photographer, subject, and viewer.
Information then becomes simply a set of relations that can be observed without interpretation.
Meaning is the product of this information and the involvement of a particular viewer, has relevance only in the form of the observed behavior of the viewer, and rests on no assumption about his feelings or emotional states. It is, instead, the raw material , for an infinite number of messages which each viewer can construct for himself. Edward T. Hall has suggested that the photograph conveys little new information but, instead, triggers meaning that is already in the viewer. This model implies that when a mother looks at a photograph of her child and does or does not like it, she is comparing the photograph with her own image of the child. If the photograph matches her image with satisfactory congruence, the picture is good.