I solved my problem: I'm making my first image viewer, and to learn how to pinch and zoom, I naively googled for how to support gestures, which are not enabled by simply adding an image view to a view controller.
Unfortunately, there are many "tutorials" on this, showing how to program with the gesture recognizers, etc. And I spent a few hours going down this route unnecessarily. I kept going because I felt tantalizingly close to getting things working: The pan gesture was flawless and was "just" zoom that was broken.
(Side question: is there some awesome source for current, iOS 6 "best practices"?)
It turns out, this is the wrong path and needlessly complex for basic gesture recognition. All that's needed is to place the image view in a scroll view. 99% of the programming is taken care of. (I was convinced this had to be the case — I couldn't believe that such core functionality wouldn't be provided by cocoa touch.)