ABSTRACT
By comparing a fin-de-siècle studio family portrait to primary-source documents (poems and montages made by participants and their descendants) and to oral histories, this chapter explores the manner by which viewers narrate photographs and create subjective temporal narratives for them that often supersede what is visible in the image itself. Observers are quick to expand upon a photographed duration in time and inhabit it, adding their subjective narrative interpretations to speak for the image. In addition, to provide a theoretical construct for the conceptualization of “narrative time,” this chapter concludes with a discussion of the “Winter Garden” photograph, which is discussed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, but never has been located.
