Essence of Hermeneutic Circle of Understanding in Aesthetics of Photograph Interpretation

In classical hermeneutics, the process of understanding is a mental operation realized the live human experience by it. Understanding opens our world and to us. According to Heidegger, understanding is the power to understand one’s own possibilities for existence and in the context of the global environment which the man lives in. The achievement way of the understanding, understanding layers and the issue of circularity of understanding are the concerns of the hermeneutic and ontological theologians. In this regard, Roland Barthes1, in his latest book, "Camera Lucida", in an understanding achieved from the photo as a text, considers the entities of the photograph context in a rotating circle of the audience and the life context and the dialectical relationship between the particular audience of the photo, the context of the photograph and the tradition in which the audience and the photo have raised. The circularity of understanding is one of the important issues discussed in the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher that today it is known as hermeneutical circle. In the history of the philosophy, Schleiermacher2 has remembered as the father of the modern hermeneutics. He has delivered the circularity of understanding to describe the understanding the text. While the later, Martin Heidegger3 and his student, Hans-Georg Gadamer4 , in his hermeneutical theory, did not dedicate this issue to the understanding and they developed and expanded this circle to the fundamental principle of human understanding on the nature and his state. Hermeneutics circle, totally, describes this issue that how the component and the whole, in the process of understanding and interpretation, are related to each other in form of a circle: understanding the components is necessary for understanding the whole, while understanding the components, there should be understood the whole. Our understanding of photos depends on the current situation of the interpretation and the interpreter and also the interpretation of photos is related to the world that the photo describes it. The appearance of such understanding circle can be observed so well in actions and reactions of the photography and in the conditions of the truthful sight. This paper, based on the text "Camera Lucida", has investigated the nature of hermeneutic circle of understanding on the interpretation of photographic works and has attempted to explore the representations of the understanding circle in the context of the photo.