Visual
Cultural (COCU108)
Professor: Brian Goldfarb | Winter 2005, UCSD
Week 3 notes: Reading Images
1. Ideology: (The reading of images is a political act)
- Pejorative sense: propaganda and false representations.
- A Shared systems of belief.
- A mundane process where by widely shared values (about
the way things are and the way things should be) are made to seem natural.
- Ideologies are connotations parading as denotations.
2. Semiotics and Structuralism
- Charles Peirce a science of signs
- Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, 1915
- The sign as a
structure of a signifier and a signified
- Anything perceptual can be a sign: a material object,
clothing, a sound, a word, an image, an event
- Semiotics is the process of interpretation of signs
or signifiers.
- Signs are arbitrary and relative (unfixed)
- Rene Magritte "Treachory
of Images" pipe
2, pipe3,
"Laguage
of Dreams"
3. Barthes and the myth of photographic truth
Rhetoric of the Image
- The (photographic) image as unique type of sign
- Marc Riboud,
image of breadline
- Barbara Kruger "Untitled:
Happy, Sad, Awake"
- Alexander Gardner,
Slain Rebel Sharpshooter
- Robert
Capa (Endre Friedman), "Death
of Loyalist Militiaman Frederico Borrell Garcia, Cerro Muriano (Cordoba
Front)," 1936,"Pablo
Picasso and Francoise Gilot, Golfe-Juan, France," gelatin silver
print, 1948
- Digital
divorce photos
- Panzini
- Paris match: Salute,
Citroen
- Is the relationship between an image and it's referent arbitrary?
- The photo has three messages:
- linguistic
- coded iconic
- non-coded iconic
- Two dynamic relationships among text and image:
- Anchorage (directs toward a particular meaningÑselective)
- Relay (adds to meaning, information not in the pictureÑextra
diagetic)
The Photographic Message
- The press photograph has a source of emission, a channel
of transmission and a point of reception
- The photographic paradox:
- a reduction and not a transformation of the object
- a message without a code--a continuous message
- distinct from other analogous images
- Connotative proceedures:
- trick effects
- pose
- objects
- photogenia
- aestheticism
- syntax
- Text as parasitic message
- Images are polysemous-a floating chain of signifiers
- The traumatic image--the suspension of language
4. Viewers Make Meaning
- Producers' intended meanings and recieved meanings of viewers
(reception theory or reader-response theory)
- context
- interpretation
- re-use or appropriation
- Dominant and shared meanings
- Aesthetics and Taste
- (Komar and Melamid 's Most
Wanted Paintings)
- Kant's Aesthetics
- Piere Bourdieu Distinction: A social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste
- Individual vs social determinants of taste
- Taste and desire
- Taste and institutions of class (economic/social/intellectual
standing)
- Taste and ideology
- Rembrandt van Rijn, The
Jewish Bride, c.1665. oil on canvas. Netherlandish
- Georges Seurat, Sunday
Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte, 1884-88. oil on canvas.
French.
- Paul Gauguin, Ia
Orana Maria (We Hail Thee Mary), c.1891-92. oil on canvas. French.
- Pablo Picasso, Les
Demoiselles D'Avignon, 1907. oil on canvas. French.
- Marcel Duchamp, Fountain,
1917. readymade: porcelain mass-produced urinal and paint. French.
- Anonymous, Hitler
Visiting the 'Great German Art Exhibition" at the House of German
Art, 1939. photograph. German.
- Lee Krasner, Untitled,
1949. painting. American.
- Piet Mondrian, Composition
with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1928. oil on canvasDutch..
- Jackson Pollock, Autumn
Rhythm, 1950. oil on canvas. American.
- Hans Namuth, Photograph
of Jackson Pollock painting, Springs, 1950. photograph. American.
- Mark Rothko, Number
15, 1948. oil on canvas. American.
- Marxist formulations of ideology
- Louis Althuser:
- Antonio Gramsci:
- hegemony
- power is negotiated (dynamic model)
- Stuart Hall: encoding and decoding
- Dominant/hegemonic reading (preferred reading)
- Negotiated reading
- Oppositional reading
- Michel de Certeau, Ian Ang, Dick Hebdige, John Fiske, Constance
Penley, Janice Radway
- semiotic guerilla tactics (vs strategies)
- ... once the images distributed by the telly and the
time spent in front of the TV have been analysed, we are still left with
the question of what the consumer constructs (fabrique) with these images
and during these hours. The 5,000 purchasers of Information-SantŽ [a French
magazine], the supermarket users, .... the consumers of journalistic stories
and legends, what do they construct out of what they 'absorb', receive
and pay for? What do they do with it? .... The enigma of the consumer-sphinx.
de Certeau (from The Invention of Everyday Life,1980)
- struggles at the level of popular culture and subculture
