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Original comment:
 
>Consider:  What are the implications of people saying "This is my
>mother" when displaying a snapshot of a woman?  Clearly the small piece
>of paper is not literally "mother."  But for the purposes at hand
>one can elide the middle words in the sentence "This is a picture of
>my mother."
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>Cal Pryluck, Radio-Television-Film, Temple University, Philadelphia
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Not that this doesn't remain a good question, but haven't the implications
of this elision been discussed at length for years, by Bazin, Sontag,
Barthes, and more recently John Tagg, Joel Snyder, and Norman Bryson?  This
is the question at the heart of every realist/resemblance debate in
photography criticism.