In German there is the term Symbolfoto or Symbolbild. It describes a photographic picture that represents a concept by means of abstraction or indirection.
A Symbolfoto could be a picture of food package contents prepared in a particular way — a serving suggestion therefore is a special type of Symbolfoto. Or it could be used in news articles, e.g. showing a picture of a traffic jam in an article describing holiday traffic — without actually depicting an actual traffic jam that the article might talk about.
In other contexts, Symbolfotos can be used for satirical or humorous purposes. For instance, a picture showing a ski slope with artificial snow surrounded by dried out mountain ranges in the middle of autumn could be seen as a Symbolfoto for the climate crisis and human desire to ignore it. There are many posts on German social media captioning images with “Symbolfoto”, thus giving the picture a new meaning.
There is a thread discussing this on a dictionary forum, but it is unresolved.
Is there any term or idiom for this in English?
Best Answer
The German language is fond of gluing nouns together to form new nouns that are distinct from the whole of their parts. English does have "symbol"(/symbolic) and "photo," and often simply calling it a "symbolic photo" might be the most direct solution.
However, there are some terms that are appropriate in specific situations: