Roland Barthes argues that the photograph retains a mystique artifice, that it is a "certificate of presence" of past existence, although the meaning of the existence remains undisclosed. John Berger, like Barthes, believes in the opacity of meaning in the photograph and the vital role of both memory and the spectator in granting meaning to the image. But, as Susan Sontag argues, photographs are open to manipulation as their presence is combined with silence. For Janette Turner Hospital, the relationship between memory and the image allows the viewer of a photograph to rewrite the narrative inherited from the past with meanings appropriate to the present. Hospital's fundamental concerns are how to read meaning in appearances and the necessity of the transfiguration of memory. In Borderline, a photograph becomes the bearer of the past into the present. Although photographs offer magical and apparently transparent reference to the unattainable past, they hover on the borders between worlds, offering possible sites for fictions of transfiguration.
