Essentials of Visual Interpretation

Rachel R Reynolds, Greg Niedt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000334708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Essentials of Visual Interpretation explains how to talk and write critically about visual media and to examine how evolving visual environments, media, and technologies affect human selfunderstanding and culture formation.

Lively and accessibly written chapters provide a solid foundation in the tools and ideas of visual meaning, familiarizing readers with a growing, cross-cultural subfield, and preparing them to pursue thoughtful work in a variety of related disciplines. The authors include rich examples and illustrations—ranging from cave paintings to memes, from optical science to visual analytics, from ancient pictographs to smart phones—that engage students with the fascinating complexity of visual interpretation. Each chapter introduces students to key terms and concepts relevant to visual analysis, with ideas for short individual or group exercises to enhance understanding.

The book is ideal as a primer in visual analysis and visual communication for students in courses within communication studies, cultural studies, digital humanities, semiotics, media studies, and visual anthropology.

Online support materials include multimedia activities for students and links to additional resources for students and instructors.

1

How is Seeing a Cultural Practice?

Introduction

There's an old saying that goes, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” Among the many other idioms and metaphors that rely on sight to make their point (in English: “seeing is believing,” “I couldn't believe my eyes,” etc.), this is one of the few that calls attention to how subjective sight can be. Those of us who can see often think of sight as the most reliable of the senses, whose evidence can be trusted, yet we often forget that what we see is subject to biology, culture, and experience. So much of what we see—comprehension, interpretation, reaction—unfolds differently for every person. Our purpose with this book is to take apart that process, and encourage you, the reader, to think more deeply about what it means for you to see the world. How might your perception and ability to “read” the meanings in the world you see around you (hence, visual interpretation) be different than someone else's? This chapter is intended to start you on the path to understanding how much more complicated seeing is than you might realize.

It makes sense to begin a discussion of visual meaning with an image or two. You are probably not familiar with either of the two images below even though they have special place in American and world visual history. Take a close look at both of them now (Images 1.1. and 1.2), without captions.

IMAGE 1.1

IMAGE 1.2

First, we should distinguish vision, the biological mechanism of sight, from visuality, how we interpret the data we receive from sight. The two are intertwined, but nobody's vision is perfect enough by itself to give them all the data they need, and visuality's interpretations always incorporate some pre-existing ideas about the world. Still, there are some commonalities to what we perceive in the world and how we perceive it. For instance, what is your eye drawn to first in these photos? Chances are it will be the subjects' faces; humans, like all primates, are hardwired to recognize the elements that comprise faces and facial expressions too. Consider the ways the boys' heads are slightly tilted and the slight curvature of the lips on the face of the boy on the right. What emotion would you say he is experiencing in this photo? What about how both boys are holding objects in one hand and apparently manipulating those objects with the other? Even if you didn't know the title of the image, you might guess that the boys are playing, or working with some sort of purpose or direction (the paint can in the foreground could also be a tip off). At the instinctual level, you can make immediate assumptions about what you're seeing because your brain is a superb organizer of information, most of all with information about other humans. The immediate visual information you receive combines with your memory and cognition to play a key role in your initial impressions of the world around you, the other people moving through it, and representations of them in media.

This is one kind of literate interpretation of visual material: reading the face to determine a person's emotional state, or reading basic clues about what they are doing (or intend to do). What about reading the wider context of the photo? The style of the clothes and hair, the skin and features of the subject, the style of the models and the wooden box the boys are working with, and the barely noticeable woman in a cloth cap in the background, all might give you important hints. But the medium itself, a black-and-white photograph, is also a clue. (Medium is the object, virtual or real, through which the art or other message is created and presented—charcoal and paper; pixels and Photoshop; acrylic on canvas; ink on paper). Given the length of time humans have been creating visual representations, photography is a relatively recent technology. Depending on your knowledge of its history, you can probably make a reasonable guess about when this picture was taken, especially if you draw on other contextual elements in the scene.

When we add some descriptive context, your interpretive abilities will perhaps greatly increase. If you are told that the photo was taken in the United States during the influenza pandemic in 1919, how does this bit of historical knowledge alter your idea of the boys' situation and their activity? And how might your idea of them differ from someone else's? After all, there is nothing about the photo's contents that would indicate disease or another public crisis. As you start to consider how your impressions of the same shapes, colors, and patterns of light differ from other people's, you start to move from just vision to visuality. Through history and across cultures, the former has changed very little, but the latter is highly variable.

Now take a look at the girls in Image 1.2, which you might guess comes from the same era as the boys in Image 1.1. But Image 1.2 is much different in setting, subjects' pose and clothing, and the nature of the background observer, a much younger boy, who is silently watching the girls as they are photographed. What are these subjects thinking and what can you tell about their day in this scene? They are dressed in coats and hats, and have their hands firmly in pocket—it looks to be cold out. What if you hear that the title of this photograph is Newsgirls Waiting for Papers? The evolution of media (and indeed, child labor laws) has dramatically affected the role of the newspaper in daily life, at least in the United States, to the point that newspapers no longer rely upon youths to sell them on the streets or to deliver them anymore. Even with different clothes and a full-color image, could you envision a photo with this title being made in the present day?

Not all images will be equally easy to read across all the dimensions of visuality. Scenes like the one in Image 1.1 might emphasize the work, leisure, or school environment of the two boys rather than close-up portrayal of the boys themselves. It is in fact titled, Back Yard Workshop, a title that will probably further trigger your interpretation of both what the boys are up to, as well as the intent of the photographer in sharing their activity with the viewer. Meanwhile, the formal portrait-like quality of Newsgirls is rather different and might make you ask what was the purpose of the photographer in highlighting the individuals rather than their activities?

But however rich or sparse the streams of information are, you will rely on your previous experiences to further frame the details of the image. For example, the presence of the word workshop in the title of Image 1.1 carries a great deal of weight, while it's already pretty easy to guess that they are in a back yard. Once you are able to pair the image with that word, you begin to apply all your knowledge and ideologies of what work is, as well as the concept of childhood and perhaps schooling under quarantine, given the photo's pandemic context. Remember that once you move past your basic visual instincts, it is impossible to examine a photo like this without any of your pre-existing prejudice or cultural judgments shaping your opinion. People who have been homeschooled in the COVID-19 epidemic will emotionally and intellectually, indeed experientially, see the photo differently than those who haven't. Likewise, those who have grown up in the smartphone, video-on-demand, and online schooling era, or those who associate schooling with college readiness, rather than vocational education, might find the idea of a backyard-based schooling activity unusual or quaintly old-fashioned. The fact that the boys are white adolescents will also have different weight to different viewers. This variability in seeing lies at the core of visuality; acknowledging that each of us has a unique personal and social history of experience (or subjectivity) helps us understand why a single, fixed image can have so many different intentions and interpretations.

Nevertheless, certain habits and inclinations in interpretation—of portraits for example—can gain a kind of density over time, becoming culturally fixed as a benchmark against which all others are measured. That can be said of the personality and connection that comes through to us in the desire of the two photographers (they were different people) to create strong photographic portraits of their subjects. With both the reading of the photos and their creation, we can talk about their aesthetics, the philosophical idea of what makes something art, or at least artistic. Look at how the photographers have composed or selected elements of the scenes here. How do they compare to other historical or documentary photographs you've seen, especially those from the early 20th century, or those of young people? What “rules” must a photographer consider that, say, a political cartoonist or fashion photographer wouldn't have to?

Once we begin to move even further outside the frames and captions of the photos themselves—literally and figuratively—we can start trying to read their purposes and effects at another level. Would you have a different opinion of these photos if you saw them hanging a museum, instead of in this book? What about if they were part of an exhibition or website created to illustrate the story of the American Red Cross? Or what if they were created as a political project to document the widespread nature of child labor exploitation in the United States, one that successfully spurred legislators into creating new labor laws and schooling opportunities for children and youth? Both photos are part of named digital collections of historical significance in the United States Library of Congress. Image 1.1 or Back Yard Workshop is part of a collection of over 50,000 photos with negatives that were donated to the Library of Congress in 1944 and 1952 with the understanding that they belonged to the American people.

The collection captures a specific time span and purpose in the history of photographic documentation. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the American Red Cross had sent professional photographers as part of their Magazine Bureau to document their humanitarian work in war zones, disaster areas, and with the poor and the sick. Although Image 1.1 could perhaps also be considered an early version of a nonprofit promotional photo, it reflects the richness of historical events like the influenza pandemic—in this case, in Denver, Colorado, for the National American Red Cross Mountain Division. Fortunately, in a collection that wasn't fully indexed, or for which at least some documentation data has been lost, more data on a card associated with the image tells us that it was taken “while School was closed for Influenza.” Now that we know this, we may begin to appreciate that the woman on the steps is more than likely a Red Cross worker or full-time volunteer (and rather than forgotten, honored today through this collection), wearing a very nurse-like uniform that includes a full head covering. Likewise, we may start to notice that the boy on the left is in short pants and that his shirt is outsized for his still childlike frame. We may conclude that the boys are either temporarily or permanently without family; at the very least, there is some mystery surrounding why they were left to the Red Cross for guidance and care during the Pandemic. Read a little further on that card, however, and it references the Junior Red Cross, so one starts to wonder if these boys are themselves volunteers, helping out by making toys for younger children.

By contrast, the photo of the Newsgirls was taken by well-known child labor activist Lewis Hine in Hartford, Connecticut in 1908. Hine was a sociologist and a teacher, not a trained photographer; this particular portrait photo is one of his better artistic efforts. Typical of the notes Hine and his helpers wrote on photo prints, the back of this one reads: “Largest girl, Alice Goldman has been selling for 4 years. News dealer says she uses viler language than the newsboys do. Bessie Goldman and Bessie Brownstein are 9 years old and have been selling about one year. All sell until 7 or 7:30 P.M. daily. Location: Hartford, Connecticut.”

These words give us a lot more about how Newsgirls Waiting for Papers works as a cultural and historical object. Unlike the first photo, we have names and even personalities of the subjects, something exceedingly rare in photos from this era. We see some of the evidence of how Hine worked. He had quit his job to spend two dozen years criss-crossing the country, collecting photos with names, stories, circumstances, and, crucially, the ages of very young people who were working 10–16 hour days, 7 days a week. This effort was a form of relatively new socially active investigative journalism called “muckraking,” in which practices of exploitation and corruption were unearthed and documented in order to effect social change. In his trips, Hine generated thousands of photographs, demonstrating the human and economic toll of child labor on the people of the United States to both politicians and the public. His mission is reflected a bit today in the title of the Library of Congress Collection in which his photos are stored: The National Child Labor Committee Collection. At first glance, the photo that seemed like just another antique artifact has become a touchpoint for exploring the period it depicts in a deep and complex way.

These photos above require different kinds of work from you as a reader, starting with the initial look that leads you to draw some tentative conclusions about the subjects. Captions and other immediate elements are also part of what forms your understanding, an example of combining information from different elements like words and the photos together called multimodality, which we will refer to frequently in this book. And you draw on your general knowledge of cultural contexts, including everyday practices and logics that are almost unspoken to start to figure out what is going on as well. Finally, you integrate what you think you've “seen” as objective knowledge into wider contexts that tell you about history and beliefs, and how those might connect to the intent of the photo, or why it was made in the first place. Throughout this book, we will examine these processes in many situations and forms. The goal is to enhance your overt sense of what “seeing” is, and how to talk about it.

Note that many important terms are italicized and bolded in spots where they are first defined, and then elaborated. They also appear in an index at the end of the book so that you can easily look them up, and hopefully become comfortable with using them. Likewise, exercises at the end of each chapter are geared toward applying the abstract ideas we've introduced to interpreting visual elements of other unique images and situations, exploring how visual culture is created and responded to in daily life. Finally, we give a few suggestions for more in-depth exploration of chapter topics, for those of you interested in learning more.

Culture

We mostly use the word “culture” here in a way that echoes anthropologist E.B. Tylor's definition: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other c...