This paper explores an analogy between the meaning structure of psychic trauma and the meaning structure of photographic images. It argues that like traumatic experience, photographs are displaced from the “reality” they reference. The photograph is not, ultimately, the record of an event. In a significant and intelligible way, the event never happened or was never experienced. With the advent of digital imaging, viewers increasingly do not expect photography to represent a real objectivity. This paper questions the notion of a redeemable reality in an image. In photographic criticism, some scholars argue for a depicted reality that is irredeemable; others think that the reality of photographs can be redeemed in the future. This paper claims that photographs simply do not depict reality. Rather than looking at a photograph as the depiction of an irredeemable past or the promise of a redeemable future, we can look at it as analogous to a trauma, where what matters is not the inaccessible original event but the history of interpretations.