Visual Culture

Visual Culture

Harvard Referencing

example: 

            Authors           Year      Page no.

Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, Pg 1 + Pg 10

Visual Culture - all aspects that communicate trough visual means - everything we see, have seen, or may visualize

practice of looking - we see things every day but that doesn't mean that we actually look at them

Idea of being watched "Big Brother"

- originally from George Orwell's '1984' but more recently and probably more commonly known to a more modern audience as a reality TV show

power to conjure up an absent person e.g. photos

power to calm

incite into action

power to persuade/mystify

images provoke emotional responses

images have different meanings when read by different people - read differently depending on how much you know about the history of it

negotiation 

negotiate social relationships + meanings through looking

looking like speaking/writing is a practice

looking involves relationships to power, learning to interpret

looking/ not looking is a choice and influencial

mydavidcameron.com

pic 1 - power over you - original message

pic 2 - taking back power - public 'taking the mick'

polysemic - multiple meanings

paintings, photos and electronic images rely on each other for their meanings - intertextuality

quote (Mirtzeoff, 1999)

how we see things is affected by knowledge and beliefs

we see what we look at - looking is an act of choice

we never look at one thing - always looking at relationships between things and ourselves

quote - worth a read - Berger, 1972, pg. 8

Roland Barthes - 'The Death of the Author'

two levels of meaning - denotative + conotative meaning

denotate - apparent truths - what is

connote - culturally specific meanings - what is suggested

myth - refer to the cultural values and beliefs that are expressed through connotation

an image's meaning doesn't just come from the image

meanings appear when the image is viewed and interpreted

images have multiple meanings - polysemic

encoding + decoding 

interpreting images means examining the assumptions that people bring to them and decode the visual language that they 'speak'

images contain layers of meaning - context, concept and form

viewers engage in the production and consumption of meaning when they 'look'

Claire Twomey

Victoria + Albert 
2000 birds around the V + A

some ways of interpreting the visual:

compositional interpretation

context analysis

semiotic meaning

psychoanalysis

a sign is a thing - object, word or thing - with a particular meaning to a person/group of people 

sign made up of the signifier - material object +  the signified 

producer encodes

viewer decodes

meaning depends on shared cultural meanings

The Male Gaze