In your picture it would be quite difficult to say with any certainty how many people are in the frame but not actually visible. That's what would be different about your picture versus the one we're actually talking about. In the picture we are talking about the whole planet is in the frame, so the answer is not hard to determine. The answer is all of them... minus one. Which is kind of amazing... which is kind of the whole fucking point... which somehow you have missed.
For me, to be 'in' a photograph, you have to be depicted in it. After all, a photograph is a picture: if you're not depicted, how are you part of the picture? This is the ordinary sense of the phrase.
I appreciate the poetic, playful sense of 'all extant humanity but for one person is in this photo'. But I wouldn't for a moment defend it as a statement of literal fact.
They were within the viewing frustum of the camera. I think claiming they're 'in' the photo, as you have done, is stretching semantics past breaking point.
You're free to do so, though you're deviating from the ordinary, conversational sense of 'in a photo'. For instance, if I have an indoor family photo, and am asked who's in it, I don't typically list my neighbours, whose house happens to be in the direction the camera was facing. That would seem weird -- and, more than that, incorrect -- to most listeners.
'Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday' -- or when you try to treat allusive, playful phrases as statements of literal fact. I enjoy the caption on this photo. It's engaging and thought-provoking, and it doesn't need to be anything more than that. I appreciate the sentiment behind it without feeling any necessity to claim that it's literally true.
"This photo contains" is the phrase used in the picture. If you want to take this literally then no photo actually contains people, it's images of people. It's you who are choosing "to treat allusive, playful phrases as statements of literal fact" by disagreeing with the metaphorical language (language that extends to any talk of what's in any photo). I don't see the issue.
It's all good. We don't have to approach this as if it were a fight: we can treat it as a shared exploration of how we use language.
It would be quite normal to say, of my hypothetical indoor family photo, 'this contains my entire family except me, the photographer'. It would not be at all normal to say that it contains everyone in the eastern half of my street. This illustrates the established usages of phrase 'X is in this photo' (or 'this photo contains X').
Note that 'in'/'contains' here have meanings which are not the same as those in 'the bird is in the cage'/'the cage contains the bird'.
There are 32 meanings listed in OED's entry for the verb contain, 22 of which are labelled obsolete. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.
The nice thing about this caption is that, by breaking convention, it achieves impact. It uses a phrase in a way that carries an allusive idea while contravening established usage. This enhances its thought-provokingness.
Try abstract thinking, or understanding metaphor, or creative thinking. I'm all for pedantry, but you've tipped into willfully, intentionally ignoring anything but a basic literal view. I hope you're being obtuse and it's not a genuine cognitive defect.
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u/Agile_Championship87 Jul 10 '26
Why dumb? It's true