The message, the meaning, of the photographs for the curators of this exhibit resided in their being objective records of medical science. Beginning in the late 1980s, another use, another sense of meaning, was being found, or made, in these photographs. This calendar coupled intentionally created art photographs with archival images. In the 5 years of its production, the calendar became very popular among many local Philadelphians and even gained a national reputation. The calendar joined the expanding numbers of books and art projects devoted to using the body as an aesthetic object.
Photographs are an elusive phenomenon, an 'attractive nuisance', in the larger study of meaning.
One way to 'look' at photographs, or to theorize that act of looking, is to see pictorial images as direct imitations of reality, a means of scientific documentation. As such they are considered too weak or too rudimentary to attempt a detailed analysis of their meaning. Alternatively, images are seen to contain more possibilities of signification than it is possible to understand. One school of thought within the anthropology of visual communication approach is that visual and pictorial images should be considered texts that are read by individuals depending on their different and multiple interpretive strategies. As all communication relies on the sign, on the relationship between a token and a referent, the problem with studying photography is that the text in question, the token of photographic images, has most often been assumed to be iconic, a sign based solely on resemblance.