Private lanaguage, vagueness and why you are (not) looking at a photo.

The private language argument by philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein is of central importance to debates about the nature of language. This interesting theory from Wittgenstein about language is that language maps words to ideas, concepts or representations in each person’s mind. In simple terms, we put images into each others heads. The only problem we humans have, and why we can never truly communicate what we really mean: language can be vague. For example we use vagueness in our communication daily, such expressions as right or wrong, few or many, hot or cold, short or tall, soon or later. We can of course still understand what the other person wants to communicate, but the mappings to our individual brains are created differently.
Photography seems like one of the possible solutions to tackling the problem of different mappings to our brains. Photography has always related to the representation of a ‘true’ world. When you see it, you can not deny it. When I show you a picture of a pink elephant, we think and talk about the same pink elephant. You do not have to map the image yourself anymore, since the photographer did the mapping for you. When you read or hear about a pink elephant, there is a very high probability that your pink elephant is different from mine, and again different for the person next to you. Then again, photography has long passed on from being a medium of truth. We all know about the unlimited ways and means to edit, play with its reality and tricking an audience using photography. Still, to this day, we agree on a certain ‘truthfulness’in photography, since we can not deny what we actually see. Photography might not exclusively be about the act of taking a photo, but the act of mapping ideas, using photography as a tool to share an idea to an audience.
So what does this mean for our mapping? If I tell you you are looking at two photos, you would at first sight disagree. Possibly only after the fact that I tell you I actually took two photos would you agree that it is a photo. But, there is a possibility that you would still disagree. The blank page is pure white, a normal printer does not even use any ink to print this photo. This means that there is actually not any (physical) property of the original photo present on the print. The second page does have a physical property added to it, namely the line drawn onto it. Again, the second page is also a photo. With values making the photo equal to the original drawing, does it keep on being a drawing, or is it a copy? Probably you think of it now as a photo, since I told you it actually is a photo. What if I simply did not tell you?
Since these mappings are borderline cases, these photos enter the realm of vagueness, either you agree it is a photo or you disagree. Like with the other examples in vague language it can be solved partially by either giving more context (e.g that is wrong according to the law), or settling an agreement when a vague expression changes state (e.g a person taller than two meters is generally perceived as being tall). It might be that your view depends on which of the two pictures you are looking at. It probably changed while reading this and it probably changes the mappings you make in the future. It might be that you are now (not) looking at a photo.