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NEUST VISION
NEUST is a locally responsive and internationally relevant and recognized
University of Science and Technology.

PANANAW
Ang NEUST ay Pamantasan ng Agham at Teknolohiya ng matugunin sa pambansang
pangangailangan,napapanahon, at kinikilala sadaigdig.

NEUST MISSION
To develop new knowledge and technologies and transform human resources into
productive citizenry to bring about development impact to local and international
communities.

LAYON
Makalinang ng mgabagong kaalaman at teknolohiya, at baguhing-anyo ang yamang
katauhan upang maging mabungang mamamayan na magdadala ng kaunlaran at
pagbabago sa pambansa at pandaigdigang pamayanan.

COLLEGE GOALS
1. Articulate the relationship of education to larger historical, social, cultural, and
political processes.
2. Facilitate learning using a wide range of teaching methodologies in various types of
environment.
3. Develop alternative teaching approaches for diverse learners.
4. Apply skills in curriculum development, lesson planning, materials development,
instructional delivery, and educational assessment.
5. Demonstrate basic and higher levels of thinking skills in planning, assessing, and
reporting.
6. Practice professional and ethical teaching standards to respond to the demands of
local and international communities.
7. Pursue lifelong learning for personal and professional growth.

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 Foreword and Preface

This module is intended for a one-semester course in Reading Visual Arts for
teacher-education students who wish to learn fundamental language of visual arts with a
detailed discussion in teaching and learning circumstances. The students will also learn
about the essence, significance, and ways of reading pictures, paintings, etc..
This module enables learners to equip knowledge and skills for development of
visual literacy. This also provides an overview of the forms of visual interpretation that are
suitable for use in circumstances. The book will also give students an insight of the value of
visual arts as a resource for teaching and learning process.
The author is not the sole proprietor of the information, graphics and illustrations
contained in this book. Most of them have been adapted from the work of different writers,
primarily Open Educational Resources (OER) (International Society for Technology in
Education and Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Reading the Visual (2004)), Media Literacy in
the K–2 Classroom, Frank W. Baker.). This workbook is planned specifically for classroom
use only and not elsewhere.

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 Table of Contents
Page

Foreword and Preface i

NEUST Mission ii

NEUST Mission ii

College Goals ii

Unit 1: The Language of Visual Arts 5

Unit 2: Reading the Visual 30

Unit 3: Visual Technologies 43

Unit 4: Communication and the Visual 54

Unit 5: Visual Literacy: Reading Pictures 59

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 UNIT 1
THE LANGUAGE OF VISUAL ARTS

Overview

Visual art is widely recognized in predominantly visual, such as ceramics, drawing,

sculpture, sculpture painting, prints, design, craft work, photography, video, film and
architecture. It takes years of continuous practice for a person to learn visual arts, so that
they can bring their imagination and creativity succinct.
According to studies, visual arts help students explore their creative side as well as
it helps them in their academics for it allows interaction between the elements and
concepts of art that enable artists to coordinate sensory works of art, as well as provide a
context in which aesthetic ideas can be explored and addressed.
In this unit, you will learn about the nature, scope, elements, functions, and
mediums of visual art; and, the subject, ways of presenting the subject, and its levels of
meaning.

Learning Objectives
At the end of the unit, I am able to:
1. describe the nature, scope, elements, functions, and mediums of Visual Art; and,
2. identify the subject, ways of presenting the subject, and levels of meaning of
Visual Art.

Activating Your Prior Knowledge

A. Fill out the chart below to assess your familiarity about arts and visual arts.

What I know? What I want to know??

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 Expanding Your Knowledge

What is Art?
There is no universally accepted definition of art. Although commonly used to
describe something of beauty, or a skill which produces an aesthetic result, there is no clear
line in principle between (say) a unique piece of handmade sculpture, and a mass-
produced but visually attractive item. We might say that art requires thought - some kind of
creative impulse - but this raises more questions: for example, how much thought is
required? If someone flings paint at a canvas, hoping by this action to create a work of art,
does the result automatically constitutes art?
Even the notion of 'beauty' raises obvious questions. If I think my kid sister's
unmade bed constitutes something 'beautiful', or aesthetically pleasing, does that make it
art? If not, does its status change if a million people happen to agree with me, but my kid
sister thinks it is just a pile of clothes?

Nature and Scope of Visual Arts

Visual art includes all the fine arts as well as new media and contemporary forms of
expression such as Assemblage, Collage, Conceptual, Installation and Performance art, as
well as Photography, (see also: Is Photography Art?) and film-based forms like Video Art
and Animation, or any combination thereof. Another type, often created on a monumental
scale is the new environmental land art.

Functions of Visual Art

Generally speaking, there are five main functions of the visual arts: ceremonial,
artistic expression, narrative, functional, and persuasive. To these can be added “beauty,”
in effect, the desire of the artist to simply create something beautiful with little or no
thought to any significance beyond that objective.
1. The ceremonial purpose of the visual arts is to celebrate or acknowledge an event or
era, or to contribute to a ritualistic activity, such as a dance celebrating one of the
season or a people’s flight from captivity or hunger.
2. Artistic expression refers to the desire or need on the part of the artist to express his
or her emotions or feelings regarding a particular subject, including his- or herself.
3. Functional - Create artistic objects used in everyday life
4. Persuasive - Promote ideas or products (Advertising, Marketing, Propaganda,
ideology)
5. Narrative - Tell stories, Describe or illustrate experiences, Communicate ideas or
information, Document historical events

The Subject Of Art: Meanings, Kinds And Functions Of Subject

To a majority of people, the appeal of most works of art lies in the representation of
familiar objects. Their enjoyment of painting, sculpture and literature comes not from their
perception of the meaning but from the satisfaction they get out of recognizing the subject
or understanding the narrative content.

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 The subject of art refers to any person, object, scene or event described or
represented in a work of art.
Representational or Objective
• Arts that have subject (eg Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, Literature and Theatre
Arts)
Non-Representational or Non-Objective
• Arts that do not have subject.
• Music, Architecture and many of the Functional Arts – Program Music – musical
compositions which have subject
• They do not present descriptions, stories, or references to identifiable objects or
symbols. Rather they, appeal directly to the senses primarily because of the
satisfying organization of their sensuous and expressive elements.
• Many contemporary painters have turned away from representational to non-
objective painting. They have shifted their attention to the work of art as an object
in itself, an exciting combination of shapes and colors that fulfills an aesthetic need
without having to represent images or tell a story.
• Many modern paintings are like this making them more difficult to comprehend.

Ways of Representing Subject

• The manner of representing subject varies according to the intent and inventiveness of
each artist.
1. Realism – when things are depicted in the way they would normally appear.
– Strictly speaking, no work of art is realistic. Since no work of art is an accurate
copy of what exists in the natural world.
– Some paintings seem to be photographic renderings of facts or anchored on
historical facts.
2. Abstraction – it is the process of simplifying and/or reorganizing objects and
elements according to the demands of the artistic expression.
– Abstraction – the artist selects and renders the objects with their shapes, colors
and positions altered. In some abstract works, enough of a likeness has been
retained to represent real things.
– In others, the original objects have been reduced to simple geometric shapes and
they can be rarely identified unless the artist named it in title.
– His concern is the rendering of the essence of the subject rather than the natural
form itself
3. Distortion – it could also mean twisting, stretching or deforming the natural shape
of the object.
- Distortion – is when the figures have been so arranged that proportions differ
noticeably from natural measurements.
- The relief sculptures and paintings of ancient Egypt were distorted. The head and
lower part of the body were shown in profile, while the eye and upper part of the
body were in the frontal position. Convention demanded the highly stylized
representation of the figure.
- It is usually done to dramatize the shape of a figure or to create an emotional effect.
- Caricatures employ distortions so that their targets of ridicule would appear
grotesque and hateful.
4. Surrealism – it is realism plus distortion.
Surrealism – it is a method where the artist in giving expression to what it is in the
subconscious composes dreamlike scenes that show an irrational arrangement of

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 objects. The images are recognizable, sometimes drawn from the nature but they
are so combined in utterly fantastic and unnatural relationships.

Mediums and Techniques of Visual Art

Painting Techniques

Oil:
Capable of capturing even the most nuanced
details shadowed amidst light and dark, oil is the
paint of history. Oil paint is made with natural
pigments, linseed oil and turpentine, making it
recognizable in sight and smell. The main downside
is that it can take up to nine months to dry
completely and even years for heavy impasto
(texture).

Oil paint usage can be traced back in origin

to the 5th century in Asia, broadening the scale of
its beauty when introduced to European traders in the 15th century. The Old Masters like
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn and Francisco Goya used oil as a tool to evoke
sentiments of agony, ecstasy and poetry. Modern artists seeking color saturation,
versatility and subtle illumination, prefer to use oil paint. These include Park West Gallery
artists Duaiv, Csaba Markus, Emile Bellet, Maya Green, Slava Ilyavev, Michael
Milkin, and Hua Chen.

Watercolor:
Watercolor was initially developed in Asia
during the 8th century to be laid on fine silks and
woven paper. The paints slowly made their way to
Byzantium and Europe in the 14th century, placing
its aesthetic hold onto illuminated manuscripts,
and later rendered itself to the gossamer aesthetic
of the French Impressionists.
Watercolor paint uses ground pigments
mixed with water-soluble binders. Watercolor
painting lends itself to a gradient of tonal hues
that can imitate the washes of sky and sea, but it is considered one of the most difficult
mediums to master, as it doesn’t lend itself to correction after application. Many
consider

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is then scratched into the ground with a fine tool, exposing the metal plate beneath. The
plate is then submerged into an acid bath, burning away at the exposed metal – the longer
the plate is submerged, the deeper the impressed lines became. Once removed from the
bath, the plate is inked, the surface is cleaned so that ink is only residing in the incisions
and moistened paper is pressed into the paper, extracting the ink and creating the mirror
image of the composition.

Fun Fact: Though most commonly recognized for his achievements in painting, historical
records indicate that Rembrandt carried and scratched on an etching plate like one would
casually doodle in a sketch pad!

Engraving:
Engraving, like etching, requires a
patient hand and keen eye for detail. However,
unlike etching, engraving uses cutting tools to
incise lines directly into the surface of a metal
plate – no acids are employed or grounds used
to treat the plate. This means a precise
technique is needed to print a successful
impression. The plate is then inked and
pressed against paper, to create a mirrored
version of the engraving. Albrecht
Durer preferred the technique, creating some

“St. Simon” (1523), Albrecht Durer

of the most intricate engravings of all time.

Relief Techniques
Relief printing is done as you would
imagine pressing a rubber stamp, however,
the process for creating a relief matrix is
comprehensive and requires a clean design.
Relief techniques are essentially the opposite
of the intaglio techniques described
previously, which mean that the image’s
negative areas are cut away with a knife or
chisel, leaving the image to reside on the
surface level once inked. Like many forms of
printing, the final image is the reverse image
of the matrix. Examples of relief techniques
include wood cuts and linocuts, where the
“Diurnes (Femme Assise en Pyjama de Plage II)”
relief is chiseled onto a block of wood in the
(1961), Pablo Picasso
former and a sheet of linoleum in the latter.

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Elements Of Visual Art
1. Line is the path of a moving point through space. It may indicate direction, texture,
coutours, or movement.
2. Shape is the area enclosed by a line or other shapes. Shapes may be geometric
(triangle, rectangle, circle...) or have an organic or natural character (trees, leaves,
rocks, puddles...).
3. Color is defined by hue, value, and intensity. It is the range of visual light in the
spectrum and properties of the pigments used in making visual art.
4. Hue is the name given to different wave lengths of light from the visual spectrum.
5. Value is the degree of lightness or darkness.
6. Intensity is the amount of pigment or saturation. The bright a color the more
pigment it contains.
7. Form is three dimensional (length, height, and depth of volume) shapes.
8. Space is the area occupied by an object or the area formed by the absence of an
object(s).
9. Rhythm is patterned organization of colors, lines, textures, or combinations of art
elements that create a pleasing effect. A visual rhythm will lead the eye from one
area to another in a rhthmical and orderly manner.
10. Balance is the perception of equilibrium between the elements in the piece of art.
11. Emphasis is the focal point of interest in a piece created by accenting or
exaggerating a specific area or art element to create greater interest.
12. Contrast is the comparison of two elements that appear different (values of light
and dark, hues...). Strong contrasts are the most disimilar examples of an art
element (dark - light, black - white).
13. Unity is the perception of the parts of a piece and their relationship with the
dominant or unifying element.
14. Chiaroscuro technique of using light and shade/ dark in art/ pictorial
representationi (see The Tale of Despereaux).

The Four Levels of Meaning: Formal, Subject, Context, and Iconography

1. The First Level of Meaning: Formal
When we see any object, we can immediately understand its form: the physical
attributes of size, shape and mass, for instance. With art, this may at first appear to be
simple: we can separate out each artistic element and discover how it is used in the work.
You had practice doing this in the last two units. The importance of the formal level of
meaning is that it allows us to look at any artwork from an objective viewpoint.
2. The Second Level of Meaning: Subject
Art can be grouped into specific genres, or patterns of subject matter, that are found
over time. Many of them are present in some cultures, but never present in others. These
differences give us another lens for finding meaning when we approach these types and
patterns of art.
3. The Third Level of Meaning: Context
This article highlights the importance of understanding the context in which art is made.
Pay close attention, because context, as you will have already noticed, is an important
theme in this course.
4. The Fourth Level of Meaning: Iconography
At a basic level, we can think of iconography as the conveyance of deeper meanings
through simple visualizations. It makes use of symbolism to generate narrative, which in
turn develops a work's meaning.

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 Synthesizing Your Knowledge

Activity 1
Name: ___________________________________________________ Date: ______________________
Course and Section: ____________________________________ Score: _____________________

A. What purpose of visual art is described in statement/picture? Expound your

answer.

1. Saturn was the roman name for Cronus, the god

associated in late Greek mythology with time. He
swallowed his children after being told that one of
them would dethrone him. Only Zeus, who later did
dethrone him, escaped. The painting symbolizes how
time ravages and destroys all humans. Unlike Zeus,
mere mortals cannot evade his clutches.
What purpose of art was Goya representing? SATURN DEVOURING HIS CHILDREN (1824)

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by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya.

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2. What are the different purposes of art shown in the picture?

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 Activity 2
Name: ___________________________________________________ Date: ______________________
Course and Section: ____________________________________ Score: _____________________

A. Describe the nature, scope, elements, functions, and mediums of Visual Art in your
own words.
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B. How can you use visual arts in teaching and how important is it in education?
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 UNIT 2
READING THE VISUAL

Overview

I am driving along in a car in the country. As I drive, I am looking out the

windows—straight ahead, to the right and left, through the rear-view mirror—at the sky,
hills, bush, road and the other vehicles around me. I am moving along this road, and
through this landscape, at speed—say, 80 kilometres an hour. Everything I see is seen at
speed: I am moving past trees, meadows, cattle and slower vehicles; and faster vehicles are
moving past me. Even though I am travelling at 80 kilometres an hour with my vision
framed, and thus partially restricted, by the mirrors and windows of the car, I can still see
and negotiate my environment (road, trees, road signs, other cars). I drive on the road, in
the slower lane, seven carlengths from the vehicle in front of me.
I observe speed signs, and change lanes when I come across a slower car without
causing any accidents. Suddenly a kangaroo jumps out of the bush, and bounds across the
road—a not unusual occurrence around here. I’m alarmed—I know from experience what
damage a car can do to a kangaroo, and vice versa. I rapidly focus my attention on the
kangaroo, taking in its speed, size, trajectory, distance from my vehicle, and the rate at
which I am approaching it. In almost the same instant I break and swerve to the side
(somehow I know there are no cars around me), and miss it. I drive on, more alert,
occasionally scanning the bush ahead for more kangaroos.
When I arrive at my destination (my parents’ house in the mountains, a place I have
driven to many times), I have almost no recollection of the drive, apart from the incident
with the kangaroo. I have arrived at my destination, and I am taking a photograph of part of
the house and the front part of the property. I am taking the shot from the same level as the
house but 20 metres to the side, and I am only framing part of the house (which includes
the verandah, a typical rural feature) so I can include two sets of trees. The first set is
located just in front of the house, and the trees are leafless; the second set is another 60
metres down the slope on which the house sits, and the trees are solid with foliage. The
backdrop to the house and trees is a thick mist which has partly covered the lower trees,
and seems to be moving towards the house. I have a few things in mind which have led to
this arrangement of the shot.
I want to produce a sense of space (the house as one small part of a much larger
property, which is one of the reasons I have included the second set of trees). I want to
catch the property as it usually looks at this time of year. But I also want to emulate those
landscape paintings and photographs which contextualise signs of human presence (the
house) within the forces, power and rigours of nature (the trees and the enveloping mist).
The leafless trees are situated at the centre, and take up almost half of the photograph,
while the house is peripheral (and consequently relatively insignificant). My focus will be
on the objects in the foreground (particularly the tree branches, and the way they tower
over the house); the rest of the scene (the solid trees, the paddock, the mist) will be slightly
blurred.

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 Learning Objectives
At the end of the unit, I am able to:
1. present the theme and character of the different periods of Visual Art
development in the Philippines and Southeast Asia; and,
2. explain special nature of Visual Art in the different countries Southeast Asia.

Expanding Your Knowledge

The Activities of Seeing

Planning and taking a photograph is, like many human activities, an intensely visual
experience; so is driving a car, where we are constantly visualising and making sense of the
space through which we are moving. There is one big difference, of course: driving a car is a
relatively unreflective activity and even below the level of consciousness, while taking a
photograph is usually conscious, deliberate and self-reflective. In other words, we usually
pay a great deal of attention to what we are doing when we are photographing a scene; but
when we are driving a car we are often doing so on automatic pilot, and only pay close
attention to what is around us when we need to (for instance, when a kangaroo jumps out
of the bush or when we are looking for a place to stop and have lunch).

This difference between the two activities—a difference of levels of attentiveness,

among other things—is one of degree rather than of kind because, whether we are aware of
it or not, in both instances we are making (that is, actively ‘bringing about’) the (visual)
world around us. When driving a car, or arranging a photograph, we are not simply seeing
and taking in everything that is available to our range of vision. The space I photographed
contained an extraordinary, almost infinite, amount of detail that I simply didn’t see. There
may have been rabbits, camouflaged and keeping still on the slope; birds blending into the
branches of the trees; various plants and types of grass around the house; kangaroo dung
by the lower trees; the front roof of the neighbour’s house poking through between the
bare trees and my parents’ house; a small puddle created by a dripping tap, and many other
details. Some of these things are more or less visible in the photograph, but the rest weren’t
seen and haven’t been shown. Had I seen them, I might have changed the angle, distance,
speed, frame and focus of my shot, and produced a different photograph (‘puddle outside
the house’, ‘rabbits in the paddock’). But every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not
seeing, even when we are being attentive. This is true to an even greater extent with the act
of driving a vehicle. It seems strange to suggest that I can be more attentive and reflective
when taking a photograph, which is a relatively trivial activity with no serious
consequences (about the worst result would be that my parents dislike the way the house
is shown, or maybe I could get the focus wrong) than when driving a car, where one wrong
move could cost me my life. But a lot of our visual activity in driving is more or less
automatic: we see where we’re going and what is around us, but our attention is usually
focused on only one or two spaces (the lane we’re driving in, the car in front of us). And

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even here our attention is often more general than specific. We make sure we’re driving
within the lines that designate our lane, but we don’t usually look to see whether the lines
are all the same length, or partly worn away; or notice the texture, condition or colour of
the surface of the road (oil stains, small cracks, small tufts of grass, squashed cigarette
packets). And the car in front of us is often seen in a very indistinct way. We might be
aware of the distance between the two vehicles, or the speed, size and colour of the other
car, but we rarely look at it in a detailed way, and might be hard pressed to recall its make,
year of production, condition of the tyres, number of people riding in it, or their gender, age
and skin colour.

There are other reasons why we might not pay as much attention when driving as
when taking a photograph. The trip might be over several hundred kilometres, and take
hours. We simply can’t look at things in a detailed and attentive way for that length of time,
particularly when we’re moving at speed. And moreover, while there is a link in
photography between attention and enjoyment (we have chosen to look at things, frame
them and capture them on film), a car trip is more often a means to an end rather than an
end in itself (I drive to get to work, to visit my parents, to go to a shopping plaza). In other
words, it is in my interest to be attentive when driving only insofar as my or somebody
else’s safety is concerned (watch to ensure that I’m not exceeding the speed limit, and that
I’m travelling within my lane), for reasons of economy (I only have a limited amount of
attention to give), practicality (I’m moving too quickly to take most things in), and in order
to ensure that I achieve what I set out to do (get somewhere where I can see my parents, or
take photographs, or go shopping).

Seeing as Reading

We have covered three main points so far. Firstly, when we see things we are
actively engaging with our environment rather than simply reproducing everything within
our line of sight. Secondly, every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing—
some things must remain invisible if we are to pay attention to other things in view.
Thirdly, the extent to which we see, focus on and pay attention to the world around us (the
three actions are inextricably linked) depends upon the specific context in which we find
ourselves. While the process of making and negotiating the visual (whether driving a car or
taking a photograph) is always informed by the notions of attentiveness, selection and
omission, and context, there are other issues which we need to consider, such as when we
do focus on, attend to and see something, and why do we see things differently over time,
or from other people? Consider the first paragraph in Stephen Crane’s short story ‘The
Open Boat’, which is about the experience of four men who take refuge in a rowboat after
their steamer has sunk: None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level,
and were fastened upon the waves that swept towards them. The waves were of the hue of
slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the color of
the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all seeing as
reading times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.
The men in the boat don’t know or see the sky because their attention is focused on
something of more immediate interest: the waves that threaten to overturn or smash their
boat, and take their lives. They see the waves in great detail: they are ‘the hue of slate’, with
foaming tops, and they seem sharp and threatening like rocks—that is, the waves are the
same colour (and, by extension, hardness) of slate, and as the boat comes down upon the
waves it appears to be landing on sharp, hard rocks. Now we could say that the
psychological state of the men in this extreme condition has produced an effect so that the

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waves have become, in their minds, like rocks. But, as we saw with our previous examples
of driving and photography, every act of perception takes place within a context that
orients, influences or transforms what we see. Observing a kangaroo from the balcony of a
café at a nature park produces a very different sight from what we experienced when we
swerved to avoid one on the road. Watching the approaching mists when we are deep in
the bush with a broken ankle and unsure of our way home is a very different experience
from that of treating the mist artistically, as an aspect of a photograph that depicts natural
forces. And when watching a storm from the safety of a cliff we may see the slate-hued
waves, and thrill to the drama and tension of the scene, but this does not equate with how
the sea appears to Crane’s men in that open boat.

Every perception and meaning is the product of psychological, physiological and,

above all, cultural contexts (I’m stressed, I’m not wearing my glasses, I’m lost, I’m an artist).
In other words, the things we see aren’t simply ‘out there’ in any ideal or unmediated way;
rather, we understand, evaluate and categorise—that is to say, see— things in terms of a
set of resources that we take from our cultural contexts. It has long been accepted in what
we call the human sciences and the humanities—particularly in disciplines such as
sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and cultural
theory—that we make sense of our world through the different meanings, ideas and
categories available to us. And it is this situation of a culture more or less seeing through
and for us, combined with the inflection or influence of different psychological and
physiological states, and of-the-moment contexts that produces what we see.

We can carry this insight further by suggesting that when we see we are, in effect,
engaged in an act of reading (the visual). When we read a book we try to follow, consider
and understand the material at hand (the words, the sentences, the story), and we end up
making both meanings and connections between different meanings. In Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for instance, we come to understand that Captain Nemo is
keeping Professor Aronnax and his companions prisoners aboard the Nautilus, and that he
is obsessive about not returning to land; we infer that Nemo has suffered some great
psychological hurt or loss, and that he will never let them leave the giant submarine alive.
We could say that the story of the book is about the relationship between two different sets
of wills, and how this is played out (will the Nautilus destroy other ships? Will Aronnax and
his friends thwart Nemo or escape?). But no two people will read the book in exactly the
same way: some readers will see Nemo as a heartless murderer, while others will see him
as rightfully enacting revenge on a world that robbed him of his wife and children, who
were killed in a naval battle. The point is that the same book will be subject to different
readings and interpretations precisely because people approach it from different
backgrounds and perspectives.

There is another reason why the book will be subject to different readings: readers
will want different things from it. A person with two hours to devote to a rollicking
adventure will read it differently from someone studying the book for a school or
university exam. Roland Barthes writes in The Pleasure of the Text that, when he has a
story in front of him, ‘I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again’ (Barthes 1975: 12). And he
refers to ‘two systems of reading: one goes straight to the articulation of the anecdote, it
considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language’—if I read Jules Verne, I go
fast—while the other reading ‘weighs, it sticks to the text . . . [and] grasps at every point’
(Barthes 1975: 12).

These descriptions of different ways of reading a book could just as easily be applied
to practices and ways of seeing. Barthes’ reference to his ‘skipping and dipping’ style of

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reading, for instance, pretty much sums up the orientation of the car driver who takes in
the (visual) bare minimum, while the reader who ‘weighs things’ and closely examines the
text is like the photographer carefully attending to and considering everything within the
photographic frame.

When we read a book there is always a context to that act of reading; we might, for
instance, try a book because we are familiar with the author’s other works or critical
reputation, or simply because we wanted to pass the time with a ‘quick read’. But even if
we had never heard of the book or the author, we have access to other signs, such as the
title, which would help us categorise—and thus prepare for—what we were about to read.
We would probably expect 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to be an adventure story rather
than a scientific study of deep-sea life simply because we know that adventure stories have
titles that refer to exotic, dangerous and far-away activities and places, while scientific
works are much more specific about their subject, and the language used is usually less
accessible (for instance, ‘Protandry and the Evolution of Environmentally-Mediated Sex
Change: A Study of the Mollusc’ is clearly not an adventure story). Similarly, everything we
look at and make sense of, whether it is a photograph or a set of objects within our
purview, comes with a history of commentaries, meanings and annotations which disposes
us to read it in a particular way.

The Habitus and Cultural Literacies

The relationship between those forces which dispose us to categorise and see the
world in certain ways, and the kinds of visual texts that subjects make, can be usefully
explained through reference to two contexts—one taken directly, and the other
extrapolated, from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The first is the habitus, and the second is
cultural literacy. Bourdieu famously defines the habitus as ‘the durably installed generative
principle of regulated improvisations . . . [which produce] practices’ (Bourdieu 1991: 78).
In other words:

Habitus can be understood as a set of values and dispositions gained from our cultural
history that stay with us across contexts (they are durable and transposable). These
values and dispositions allow us to respond to cultural rules and contexts in a variety
of ways (they allow for improvisations), but these responses are always determined—
regulated—by where we have been in a culture. (Webb et al. 2002: 36–7)

Our cultural history and trajectories naturalise certain values and ideas, and
effectively determine our worldview—that is, they predispose us to see and evaluate the
world in certain ways. Central to this is what Bourdieu terms distinction: this is tied up
with the notion of taste, which generally means having a refined, educated, sophisticated
and aesthetic worldview, rather than simply seeing, evaluating and categorising things
‘naively’ (say, in terms of their use value). A good example of distinction as it manifests
itself in everyday life is this story about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was
taking a walk in his garden. His gardener was surprised to see him, and said ‘Professor,
what are you doing here?’ to which Wittgenstein is supposed to have replied, ‘What are any
of us doing here?’

In order to see how distinction, and habitus, influence the way people see, let’s
consider Figure 1.2, a photograph of a pile of dishes and utensils, presumably left sitting in
the kitchen. According to Bourdieu, a sophisticated habitus would be perfectly capable of
seeing—in fact, might be disposed to see—what was within the frame as something other
than a simple reproduction of a domestic scene. A so-called sophisticated eye might see

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carefully arranged patterns and motifs (note how the utensils are all pointing one way),
references to other texts (the wobbly pile of dishes as a Tower of Babel) and social
commentary (the dishes as an index of the chaotic state of modern life). People who did not
share this habitus might dismiss such readings as boring or pretentious. They could
respond that everybody knows what the kitchen is like in a shared house, and what an
unwashed pile of dishes looks like—and they are neither beautiful, nor capable of saying
anything meaningful.

Distinction would not only dispose people to see this photograph as meaningful or
beautiful, however; it would also supply them with the knowledge and ability that would
make such a perspective possible, and provide it with legitimacy. The name we give to this
combination of knowledge and skill is cultural literacy. When we think of the notion of
literacy, we usually associate it with reading and writing skills but in this case the term
refers to a general familiarity with, and an ability to use, the official and unofficial rules,
values, genres, knowledge and discourses that characterise cultural fields. Cultural literacy
in this sense is not just familiarity with a body of knowledge; it also presupposes an
understanding of how to think and see in a manner that is appropriate to the imperatives
and contexts of the moment.

One way to demonstrate what we mean by this is to give an example of a lack of

literacy. In the Marx Brothers’ film Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx is playing a famous
explorer, the guest of a woman (played by Margaret Dumont) who is a member of high
society. Another guest is a rich art collector who is showing his most recent acquisition, the
famous painting ‘After the Hunt’ by the French artist Beauregard (a painting which shows a
hunter and his hounds). The painting has been stolen and replaced by a copy. When it is
unveiled, the owner laments that this is not the original. When asked how he can be sure
that it is a fake, his reply is that anyone can see that it is a poor imitation. He is about to
explain what he means, presumably by referring to the poorly drawn details and inferior
brushwork, but before he can do so Groucho adjusts his glasses, focuses on the painting
and says, ‘My God he’s right. One of the dogs is missing.’ The owner was showing his art
literacy by being able to distinguish, at the level of technique and detail, between a
masterpiece and a forgery. Groucho shows his lack of literacy by introducing a naïve,
content-related issue (‘There’s one less dog!’). Of course, Groucho’s illiteracy has a point to
it: it demonstrates that while a ‘high art’ habitus allows people to see particularities like
texture or subtleties of light, it also blinds them to what is in front of their noses. The owner
presumes that a forger will at least get the details right (only one man on a horse, precisely
five hounds). But Groucho, who has a more practical way of looking at things, sees what is
obvious to him but hidden from the supposedly sophisticated eye.

This very peculiar and seemingly naïve (to the owner and the rest of the party) way
of looking at and making sense of art is not in any sense idiosyncratic or accidental. Put
simply, the cultural contexts, fields and institutions that Groucho inhabits and moves
through (what we call his ‘cultural trajectory’) now effectively ‘inhabit’ him, influencing and
determining what and how he sees. If Groucho were to become part of this more
‘sophisticated’ circle, their way of seeing would become more natural to him, and
eventually influence, even determine, what he sees.

Seeing in Context

Our situation is pretty much the same as Groucho’s, in that what we see is
inextricably linked to, and is a product of, our cultural trajectories, literacies and contexts.

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This applies even when we see something for the first time. Given that we know, think and
see within our cultural frames, a truly ‘new visual experience’ is almost impossible to
imagine. Even if we were subjected to something literally ‘out of this world’, like being
abducted by aliens and taken to another planet, we would still see by using the categories
and forms of evaluation that characterise our habitus. This would happen partly because
we set up and make use of distinctions such as human/alien, even though we’ve never seen
a ‘real’ alien. Of course, we have seen representations of aliens, which are normally
distinguished from humans by their colour or size (‘little green men’), body parts (Zaphod
Beeblebrox, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had two heads which were always
arguing) or supernatural abilities (Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound).

The process through which we might see an alien—real or imagined—is more or

less the same as what is involved when we categorise ‘real people’ or groups within our
culture. We start off with a binary concept (human/alien) which is ‘filled out’ by various
signs (humans walk upright and have one head), and when we come across something or
someone which doesn’t fit into one part of the binary because of an excess (an extra head)
or lack (no head at all), we simply categorise, evaluate and see them (remember, this all
happens more or less simultaneously) as the other part of the binary (the alien).

There is another interesting aspect to this question of what happens when we see
something ‘for the first time’, and the answer is that often . . . we don’t see it the first time
we look at it. The musician Tom Verlaine, formerly of the New York 1980s punk band
Television, sang in his song ‘Postcard from Waterloo’ that ‘I recall the actor’s advice/That
nothing happens til it happens twice’. The point he is making is that the first time
something appears which doesn’t obviously correspond to categories with which we are
familiar, or which we don’t expect to see, we are likely to miss it. Using a similar logic,
science historian Thomas Kuhn writes that the physicist Roentgen’s ‘discovery’ of X-rays
was at first:

greeted not only with surprise but with shock. Lord Kelvin at first pronounced them an
elaborate hoax. Others, though they could not doubt the evidence, were clearly
staggered by it. Though X-rays were not prohibited by established theory, they violated
deeply entrenched expectations . . . By the 1890s cathode ray equipment was widely
deployed in numerous European laboratories. If Roentgen’s apparatus had produced
X-rays, then a number of other experimentalists must for some time have been
producing those rays without knowing it. (Kuhn 1970: 59)

How do we come to see what we have been overlooking? Kuhn writes that, in the
scientific field: ‘Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly . . . with the
recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that
govern normal science’ (1970: 52–3). In other words, our habitus disposes us to see certain
things, but occasionally there is a misfit—or an anomaly—regarding what we expect to see
and what we visually ‘register’. Once this anomaly is repeated, we might start to reconsider
what it is we are seeing—or overlooking.

We can exemplify this by returning to Verlaine’s reference to the ‘actor’s advice’

about things needing to happen twice. What this means is that we sometimes fail to see the
significance of something until we are aware of what we could call a pattern. So, in Peter
Jackson’s film The Fellowship of the Ring, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins is represented as an
inoffensive, generous and altogether nice type who seems untouched by desire, passion or
greed. But he has a secret: he owns a ring that has cast an evil spell on him. We see signs of
this when the wizard Gandalf asks him to hand over the ring, although the first few
manifestations (a slight hesitation in responding to Gandalf’s request, a strange look on his

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face as he ponders what to do next) could easily be overlooked. It is only when his
determination to keep the ring leads him to act ‘out of character’ (he becomes suddenly
violent and irrational), and when his face is completely transformed by the power of the
ring (his features become contorted with rage), that we notice the pattern and understand
the secret—he is possessed by the power of the ring. If we are familiar with Tolkien’s story
before viewing the film we will expect this to happen, and see what is happening ‘the first
time’; if we aren’t, however, then Bilbo’s hesitation and odd looks will just be part of a
Kuhnian anomaly—until we perceive them as part of a pattern.

Techniques of Seeing as Reading

Up to this point we have concentrated on explaining how and why people see in
particular ways, and we have referred to habitus, cultural trajectory and cultural literacy as
the most important factors in determining what we see. But we also suggested that,
whether our seeing is conscious or unconscious, the process of reading the visual relies on
the same techniques. The techniques we will consider include selection, omission and
frame; signification and evaluation; arrangement; differentiation and connection; focus;
and context. It is important to keep in mind that there is no necessary temporal distinction
between these techniques: they are part of the same process of making the visual, and one
cannot be conceived without regard to the others.
The first and most important techniques of reading the visual are selection and
omission; as we pointed out earlier, every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not
seeing. Consider the text shown in Figure 1.3, a photograph of a woman sitting on the steps
of a house with a dog. The photographer probably had a considerable amount of material to
play with; there is a house, perhaps extensive gardens, a lawn, other people and animals, a
street, other houses and maybe some cars. The photograph only shows us a selection of
these: it includes a woman, a dog, the steps, some flowers or bushes, the lower part of the
door and a shuttered window. We could consider a number of other aspects of the
selection/omission process, such as the fact that we can see the woman’s boots, but not her
eyes.

The selection of these details (and the omission of the others) helps to constitute
and make the visual. It doesn’t matter whether we are looking at a photograph, painting or
a street scene: by paying attention to and focusing on the woman and her dog in this space,
the viewer effectively constructs a frame around the scene. This is productive in two ways.
Firstly, it suggests a set of relationships between, and stories about, the various parts—
perhaps the woman is playing with her dog at her house; perhaps she is simply relaxing on
her steps. Secondly, it establishes a (usually temporary) hierarchy with regard to the
potentially visible; that is to say, whoever took this photograph or observed this scene
decided (at a conscious or unconscious level) that this content within this space at this time
was interesting or worthy of attention. In other words, they made an evaluative decision.
This may have been careful and deliberate (they set the scene, posed the woman, took the
shot) or spontaneous (they were wandering by, the scene appealed to them, they took a
photograph). Either way, these acts of selection, omission, framing and evaluation produce
a visual text.

What do we mean by the term ‘text’? Usually we think of a text as something like a
book—that is, it is an object that consists of words on pages, sometimes accompanied by
photographs, divided into chapters, authored by someone, with a title and a cover.
Sometimes we extend this to cover other mediums, such as film and television. The defining
characteristic of a text is that it is (or is treated as if it were) a unit: we think of a book or a

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film as a text because the various parts are both related and bound together. This occurs
through an arrangement of what we call signs, which can be defined, very generally, as
something (say, a word or a photo) that is read as meaningful by someone (a reader or
photographer). A group of signs is being read or treated as a text when someone considers
all the signs as a unit. For example, we usually treat a book as a text which is made up of
signs that possibly include the name of the author, the colour of the cover, the title and the
publisher’s name. In other words, a text is made up of signs that are considered to exist in
relation to other signs, the sum of which is denoted by a frame of some kind.

The most important point to keep in mind about this definition is that texts are not
simply objects which always retain the status of ‘text’. Rather, texts are produced or
created; this process of production is an ongoing one; and the status of signs and texts is
always relational and contingent. In other words, there are no natural units of signs within
cultures—or anywhere in nature, for that matter. Every time we treat something as if it
were a text, we create a unit out of an infinite number of potential signs. So the person who
took the photograph of the woman sitting on the steps took a number of potential signs
(the woman, the dog, the steps, the house, the door, the garden) and included them within
the frame of the camera’s lens, and subsequently the frame of the finished photograph.
Exactly the same kind of process occurs when someone walks up to a scene and notices
certain details within the frame of focused, attentive vision.

There is (at least) one major difference between these two visual activities. When
we look at a photograph, television, film screen or painting, we normally apprehend
something that is in front, distanced and detached from us, whereas the texts we create as
we see the world are all around us, like the visual equivalent of surround sound or virtual
reality; we are located within them and they in us. So there are several technical tasks we
have to perform, consciously or otherwise, in order to stitch together (what Jacques
Derrida in The Truth in Painting calls ‘suturing’) all these elements so that they appear to
be a single, continuous visual world.

Two important factors here are attention and focus. If we are attending closely or
carefully to an event, person, thing or scene, we will create a text that is made up of what
we can call contiguous elements. So if we were staring out of a window we might see tree
branches waving in the wind directly in front of us and a cloudy sky above, but we would
also be likely to include the window and curtains or blinds, the computer that is partly
between us and the window, a section of the desk on which the computer is sitting, the
telephone and the pile of books slightly to the side. We might be more peripherally aware
of other objects within our purview, such as the walls of the room, bookshelves, papers,
carpet or the ceiling. Our eyes may be caught by the colour or movement of things—the
deep purple of the walls, the brightly coloured, whirling images of the screen saver on the
computer. But the decision about what is included within the main frame and what is left to
the periphery is very much of the moment. In other words, if I watch the computer screen
or look out the window, the function or context of my looking and seeing (whether to do
something specific like check email, or just to look dreamily away from my work) will
determine what is included in the visual texts I produce.

Seeing in Time and Motion

A number of elements contribute to or facilitate the process of suturing the world to

make a text. Colours help us to differentiate elements within our purview (the green of the
trees and the blue of the sky); so do shape and movement (the still, rectangular window, as

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opposed to the relatively amorphous, waving tree branches). The use of colour, shape,
movement and other elements (such as texture, distance and light) does not occur in an
unmediated way, however; rather, the extent to which, and the how, we recognise, know
and use them are tied up with our immersion in, and relationship with, our cultural world
and its categories. We need to bear in mind that notions such as colour, shape and texture
are culturally specific; we naturalise the world, give it stability and coherence, and are able
to understand and explain it through our ability to maintain the (optical) illusion that what
and how we see, and the texts we create, are real. Of course these visual texts are
ephemeral. In a sense they are never stable or really ‘themselves’; after all, as I watch the
trees, time is passing. I am changing and so are the trees. This is even more pronounced,
and the texts that are produced are far more impressionistic, when we or the world are
moving at speed. Even if I am keeping still, the slightest movement of my eyes or head
automatically changes what is available to me to be processed, combined, textualised and
read. If I look slightly to the left, I might notice a bird on the window ledge, a poster on the
wall, a brightly coloured paperweight—and so I make a new text. Moreover, the dreamy
state that induced me to look out the window might be replaced by a more focused mood,
set off by some detail: I notice the paperweight keeping down a pile of papers I have to
read, so I suddenly focus on them.

We suggested that this process of production is an ongoing and transformational

one, and the status of signs and texts is always relational. Let’s consider the first of those
points, using the example of the photograph of the woman and dog to which we referred
earlier. The photographer who took that shot could have taken a second photograph from
10 metres further away, this time including the whole of the house, more of the garden, and
fourteen other dogs standing in the doorway. This would have produced a different text
because the potential relationship between the various signs (and therefore the meanings
available to anyone making sense of the text) would have been considerably altered; in the
first shot, for instance, the woman dominates space, but she would be only one small part
of the second shot. But the same principle (that remaking a text always transforms the text)
would apply even if the photographer stood on the same spot and took another shot from
the same angle, with the same frame. Why? Because time will have intervened in some way.
In the most obvious case, some additional detail will have moved into the space of the
frame—for instance, the fourteen dogs originally standing just outside the frame could all
have run down and jumped on top of the woman. This would produce a different set of
relationships between the signs, a different set of meanings and a very different text (say,
to being potentially comic). But even when there are no new signs, the original signs within
the frame will have changed in some way (the woman may have noticed the photographer
and smiled, for instance).

Gilles Deleuze draws attention to this issue in his discussion of Henri Bergson’s
theorising of the relation between movement and instant (that is, time). Bergson puts
forward the proposition (a paradox of sorts that he takes from the Greek philosopher Zeno)
that movement and instant are both inextricably linked to, and inexplicable without regard
to, one another. At the same time, neither is real in any sense—they are artifices or
illusions of perception. As Deleuze writes:

You cannot reconstitute movement with positions in space or instants in time . . . You
can only achieve this reconstitution by adding to the positions, or to the instants, the
abstract idea of a succession . . . And thus you miss the movement in two ways. On the
one hand, you can bring two instants or two positions together to infinity; but
movement will always occur in the interval between the two, in other words behind
your back. On the other hand, however much you divide and subdivide time, movement

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 will always occur in concrete durations . . . thus each movement will have its own
qualitative duration. (Deleuze 1986: 1)

In other words, no matter how quickly we look at the same scene of the woman and
the dog again and again, and no matter how much we are given to believe that things are
the same (because it seems to be the same text), things have changed in the intervals of
perception. But we can’t capture the movement of time (the changes that differentiate one
text from its successors, such as the woman beginning to smile, or the dog looking up)
because the text is only available to us as a frozen instant, a text in time.

The second point we made is that the relationship between, and the status of, signs
and texts are always relational and contingent. What do we mean by this? We suggested
that a text is made up of different signs considered and framed as a unit—a woman, a dog,
some steps together forming a photograph. But what if the photographer, or someone
watching the scene, ignored everything except for the woman, so that she alone was in the
frame? We could now say that, whereas before the woman was a sign in a text, now the
woman had become the text, and the various details regarding her body and clothes (her
boots, trousers, jumper, face, hair, hands) constituted the signs that made up the text. This
process could continue almost ad infinitum. If we focused on the woman’s face, it would
become the text, and her eyes, nose and mouth would be the signs.

Text and Intertext

Figure 1.4 provides a good example of the relational character of signs and texts.
There are five photographs arranged on a single page. They were not originally taken as a
series, intended to be placed together, or considered for public consumption; rather, they
were private family photographs which we have put together, not entirely arbitrarily, to
make a text. We can say that the combining of these particular photographs was not
arbitrary because they are clearly connected through content (members of a family appear
and reappear in them) and social function (they are all identifiable as being family portraits
or photographs).

Each of the photographs can be read as a sign within the larger text. We could focus
on one of the people (the woman in Figures 1.4a, 1.4b, 1.4c, 1.4e; the man in Figures 1.4b,
1.4d) and read between and across these signs, relate the content of each to that of the
others, and produce a narrative or account of their lives (from youth to middle age, say).
We might take this text as being about the family and its history, which would involve
identifying the different generations and their relationship to one another, through
reference to features such as clothes and physical characteristics. Each of these
photographsas-signs would have meaning in relation to the way they were read and
contextualised with regard to the other signs—that is, their meanings and status would be
determined by their textual place. But there is nothing to stop us from considering each of
these photographs individually as collections of signs—that is, as texts. So the largest of the
photographs (figure 1.4e) has a plethora of potential signs (the two women, their facial
expressions and poses, the space between them, the rural setting) which can be collected
together and read in relation to one another as a text without referring to any of the other
photographs.

A sign, we have suggested, is anything that is treated as a meaningful part of the unit
that is the text. We identify signs and group them together as if they were a unit by a
process of relating available material to the other texts and text-types with which we are
familiar from our memories and cultural histories. The use of other texts to create new

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texts is called intertextuality, and the term for text-types is genre. In order to consider
these two concepts and how they inform or influence visual activity, let’s look again at the
series of photographs in Figure 1.4.

We made the point that every photograph in the collection is made up of potential
signs (the people, their clothes, their facial expressions and poses, the space between them,
the setting) that could be treated as individual texts—without needing to refer to any of the
other photographs. But when we consider that text with regard to one or all of the other
photographs, we are making use of intertextuality—which means the process of making
sense of texts by reference to other texts, or to meanings that have already been made in
other texts. Let’s look at Figure 1.4e. We can identify two obvious signs—the two women in
the foreground sitting side by side, smiling. We don’t know anything about their
relationship or their histories, so how do we make sense of or read those two signs? We can
do so intertextually—by looking at some of the other photographs. The woman on the right
of Figure 1.4e appears also in Figures 1.4b, 1.4c and 1.4d—or at least we presume that is
the case because of the physical similarities between the various women in the shots. In
Figure 1.4b, the woman is sitting very close to a man about her own age who probably has
his arm around her waist or back. In Figure 1.4c she is much younger—perhaps in her mid-
teens—and is posing with two adults and a boy, perhaps her parents and brother. In Figure
1.4d she looks slightly older than the woman in Figure 1.4e; she is at some kind of social
function, and is the only person in the shot.

Taking these photos as a collection, we can ‘read’ a kind of narrative of the woman
in Figure 1.4e. We have the woman-as-girl, growing up in what looks to be a middle- or
upper-middle-class family in the first part of the twentieth century (which we identify from
the hairstyles and clothing). She had a relationship with, and perhaps was married to, the
man in Figure 1.4b. She was fair-skinned and probably lived in a sunny country (in three of
the four shots she is wearing head covering of some kind, although this may be explicable
in terms of the clothing fashions and conventions of the time). She probably grew up and
lived in the country, rather than the suburbs or city. The young man we take to be her
brother in Figure 1.4b is carrying rifles, and the houses and physical environments in
Figures 1.4b, 1.4d and 1.4e all have rural characteristics (the rough stone material of the
house in Figure 1.4b; the water tank in Figure 1.4d; the forest and sparsely housed scene in
Figure 1.4e).

We might search these photographs for signs that would enable us to generalise
about her history and life (she grew up and lived her life in the country in the mid-
twentieth century), her nationality (Australian, New Zealander or South African), her
predilections (in all the photographs she is wearing white shoes) and many other things.
Some of these generalisations might be relatively obvious (for instance, the relationship
between her clothes, her age and the approximate period in which she lived), while others
are little more than conjecture (were the couple in Figure 1.4b married? Does the presence
of headwear mean she was sensitive to the effects of sunlight?).

We could go on like this indefinitely, bringing in new intertexts that change the way
we read the photograph we originally considered (Figure 1.4e). The important points,
however, are that we can and do read texts such as Figure 1.4e intertextually and, even
when we don’t know specific details about those intertexts, we are disposed and able to
make sense of and read them (we presume, without knowing for certain, that Figure 1.4c is
a family shot showing parents and children). We are able to do this because every reading
of a text is informed and influenced by our intertextual reference to and knowledge of the
text-types that characterise our culture—what we call genres.

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Texts and Genres

Genres—which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 4—can be defined as ‘text types

which structure meanings in certain ways, through their association with a particular social
purpose and social context’ (Schirato and Yell 2000: 189). We normally think of genres in
terms of cultural fields and mediums such as fiction or film—for instance, detective, science
fiction or romance novels; and action, horror or erotic films. Each of these genres is
identifiable in terms of its content, narrative, characterisation, discourses, values and
worldviews. A detective film will usually have a certain kind of content as a constant (a
crime, or an act of violence), which will require the intervention of a detective who will
investigate the scene, question suspects and take testimonies from witnesses; hunt for, find
and analyse clues; and eventually uncover secrets, overcome the criminals and solve the
crime.

There will, of course, be variations across these texts. A film of one of Conan Doyle’s
detective stories will represent Sherlock Holmes as detached, observant, attentive,
analytical, incorruptible, well-mannered and supremely self-confident—all of which is
shown in the way Holmes moves, speaks, looks and acts. The values and worldviews
represented in the film (if they are faithful to Conan Doyle’s original fictions) will usually be
socially conservative, and pretty much in keeping with the dominant social values of the
time and place (so servants will be treated as if they are naturally less valuable, interesting
and intelligent than members of the middle or upper classes). Finally, the descriptions of
places and events will be strongly informed by what we could call scientific orientation:
rooms, furniture, spaces and people will be described and shown in careful, precise detail.

Not all detective films—or plays, cartoons or video games, for that matter—
reproduce or partake of all of these conventions. The socalled ‘hard-boiled’ detective films
made from novels written by American writers such as Dashiel Hammett and Raymond
Chandler will vary or even repudiate some of these characteristics (most obviously, the
detective might be a drinker and gambler who may become sexually involved with
suspects, and may work outside the law). But, by and large, there are enough constants and
carry-overs from Holmes to the hard-boiled detective stories (and later on, to the forensic,
feminist and historical detective forms) for us to categorise them as belonging to the same
genre.

The films around which these questions and issues are often played are those which
have explicit sexual content—which usually means they will be categorised as
pornography. But sexually explicit films are sometimes given a rating which allows them to
escape this classification. For example, two French films with explicit sexual content were
shown in Australia over a period of three years—Romance (directed by Catherine Breillat,
released in 1999) and Baise Moi (Coralie Trin Thi, 2002). Romance was not finally
classified as pornography, despite the fact that there were scenes showing actual sexual
activity and implied depictions of sexual violence. The main reason the film received a
restricted classification was because it was considered an art film: the director was known
to be interested in, and had dealt with, philosophical, political and social issues (the nature
of desire, masculine violence, the dehumanised state of modern society), and these same
‘serious’ issues were talked about and represented in the film. If we go back to our
definition of genre, we see that it refers the ‘particular social purpose and context’ of text
types. Romance, presumably because of the status of its director, was considered to be
showing sexual content in order to explore contemporary social issues. In other words,
unlike pornography, his sex scenes (as far as the national censorship board was concerned)

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had an artistic, social and educational function, rather than being intended simply to
produce sexual arousal.

Baise Moi was released in Australia three years later. Again, the film seemed to be
oriented towards—or at least to be informed by— social criticism and artistic features, and
it was being shown as an art house film. But after originally giving the film a restricted
classification, the censorship board reversed its decision, which meant that the film had to
be withdrawn from cinemas. On the face of it, there was very little to differentiate the film
from Romance, but in three years the social and political climate had changed sufficiently
for the two films to be given entirely different classifications and categorised as separate
genres—Romance was effectively categorised as an art film, Baise Moi as pornography.

These kinds of official classifications—and effectively generic categorisations—of

texts influence and orient audiences with regard to the way they see and read a film. Let’s
return to Romance as an example. There is a scene in the film where the female protagonist
has had an argument with her boyfriend, and has decided to pick up and have sex with a
stranger she has met in a bar. The two characters are naked and lying in bed, and are
clearly about to have intercourse. As the man moves his penis towards her vagina, the
woman comes out with a monologue about the ways in which men take sexual advantage of
women. The man stops, pulls back his penis and looks (vaguely) thoughtful. The woman
then produces a second monologue, this time about how it isn’t that simple—that sex is not
simply an issue of domination. The man listens to what she has said and, taking her words
as a positive signal, moves his penis towards her vagina a second time. Once again,
however, she produces a monologue that seems to contradict her previous utterance (‘And
yet’). The man again withdraws his penis and goes back to looking thoughtful.

Now there are a couple of ways in which this scene (and, because this scene is
reasonably representative, the entire film) can be read or responded to. The first response
is in terms of sexual excitement. The sight of naked bodies about to engage in sexual
intercourse is content normally associated with pornography—and, of course, one of the
more obvious social functions of the pornography genre is to engender sexual excitement
and pleasure. The second response, more or less diametrically opposite to the first, is to
laugh—to treat this scene (and the film as a whole) as ludicrous, pretentious and
(unintentionally) comic. After all, the very mechanical back-andforward movement of the
penis, and the incongruous combination of sexual activity and philosophical clichés, means
that pathos is in danger of being supplanted by bathos. But the fact that this film was
shown in art cinemas, received very positive reviews from critics and was the work of a
‘serious’ director probably meant that those two responses were foreclosed—at least for
many people in the audiences which saw it.

Genres then, like intertexts, do not provide us with special access to visual reality;
rather, they are frames and references that we use to negotiate, edit, evaluate and in a
sense read the visual as a series of texts. And the way in which socio-cultural fields and
institutions categorise people, places, events and texts in terms of certain genres (often
based on or associated with evaluative binaries such as normal/perverted,
civilised/barbaric, good/evil, art/pornography) orients and disposes us to see and read the
visual world in particular ways.

Conclusion

What is important, in any consideration of how we read the visual, is that as

‘readers’ we are also ‘writers’, selecting, editing and framing all that we see. Most of the

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time this work is unconscious, but even when our seeing is conscious and attentive, we will
still make what we see by using the same kinds of techniques (such as selection and
omission), and be limited in what we see by factors such as context, habitus and cultural
literacy. In our next chapter we extend this inquiry to take into account what we could call
the ‘prosthetics of seeing’—that is, we consider the relationship between visual
apparatuses and technologies, and the types of ‘visions’ they produce.

Synthesizing Your Knowledge

Note: Your activity will be sent by the instructor.

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 UNIT 3
VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES

Overview

In the previous chapter, we outlined some of the central mechanisms and

techniques by which people make sense of what they see. In this chapter we take up the
mechanics of visual perception more specifically. This includes the physiology and
neurology of seeing—how do our bodies and brains engage with the world around us?—
and also the visual apparatuses and technologies people have developed over the centuries
as aids for seeing. We address the relationship between mechanisms of perception and the
types of ‘visions’ they produce. We also look at cultural frames such as photography, film
and 3-D or interactive devices, and discuss their effect on seeing and perceiving. Central to
the question of perception is how space and objects, and movements in space, are arranged
and ‘mapped’ in the two-dimensional format that constitutes much of visual culture. We
also examine the ways in which post-Renaissance notions of ‘seeing’ and mapping space
have contributed to our understanding of the contemporary world. And finally, we discuss
some of the technologies of reproducing line and image—particularly the digital
technologies involved in seeing—and discuss their effect on our perspective of the world.

Learning Objectives
At the end of the unit, I am able to:
1. use technologies in enhancing the science and aesthetic content of visual art;
and
2. identify other factors that helps for objective evaluation of an image.

Expanding Your Knowledge

Physiology and Seeing

Modern neurophysiology has determined that something like half the brain is
dedicated to visual recognition, and that how and what we see is tied up with our
physiological structure. Our optic nerve comprises some 800 000 fibres, over 120 million
rods and over seven million cones. This means that an enormous amount of information
can be transmitted swiftly and accurately to the brain (Jay 1993: 6). The eye focuses the
image on the retina, just as the camera focuses an image on film. The retina then organises
the material which has been focused on it by using its photoreceptors (light-sensitive cells).
This is where the rods and cones come into play, the rods processing dim light, and the
cones processing colour and bright light. The photoreceptors transform what we have
‘captured’ visually into recognisable objects, and it is not until this work is completed that
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the image goes to the brain via the optic nerve, to be processed further there (Hoffman
1998: 66).

Obviously the process of visual perception is very physical—eyes are focusing on

objects; rods and cones are processing matter; and optic nerves are transporting the
images they have recorded. The history of theories of perception shows that the writers
and thinkers of the past two and a half millennia have experienced a surprising degree of
agreement about the physicality, and the tangible quality, of the process of perception.
They have, of course, differed on how this process works: the ancient Greek philosopher
Plato proposed the notion of vision by ‘extramission’—that we see as the effect of a stream
of light that flows out from the eye and strikes objects outside the body (Plato, Timaeus).
His student, Aristotle, had a different explanation: he argued that the water in the eye
transmits an image through to the soul. Although those who followed Plato and Aristotle
took various perspectives on vision, we can trace the focus on the tactile aspect of seeing to
the eighteenth-century philosopher René Descartes, who wrote that images are ‘received
by the external sense organs and transmitted by the nerves to the brain’ (1998: 61), so that
the process of sight is like that of a blind person feeling their environment by the use of a
stick (Descartes 1998: 64). Even as late as the early twentieth century, the psychiatrist
Sigmund Freud wrote that seeing is ‘an activity that is ultimately derived from touching’
(Freud 1905: 156).

But seeing is more than touching: Descartes may have used the analogy of feeling
one’s way through the world, but he did not assume that seeing depended only on a
sensory experience. Instead he insisted (as do contemporary physiologists) that our senses
are inadequate for perception—we need to make sense of what we see using rational
thought (Jay 1993: 72–3). So, though sight might appear to be a perfectly natural physical
action, neurologists insist that both the ease with which we see and the apparent truth of
what we see are deceptive. Seeing, they tell us, involves a huge amount of practice, and the
application of an enormous portion of the brain (Hoffman 1998: xi); and the brain sees not
just ‘what is out there’, but what it constructs from the matter it collects in seeing. Think of
colour, for example. As early as the eighteenth century, scientist Isaac Newton wrote: ‘Rays
to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and
Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour’ (Newton 1730/1952: 124). We
identify colour not by itself, but by its context—by the relation of light to colour, by other
colours around it, and by what we already know. A stop sign, for instance, looks red at any
time of day, though if we were to measure it with a spectroscope, its shade would vary
remarkably with the light (Finkel 1992: 402).

Not only does the brain make up, or construct, what it sees, but it is also liable to be
fooled by what is seen. We perceive topographical maps and contour lines (see Figure
2.1a), for instance, as three-dimensional and varied in depth, even though they are only
lines on a flat page or screen. And, despite the incredible receptive facility of the eye, it is
(we are) fooled by light, distance and intensity. Figure 2.1b is a common puzzle: we are
asked to determine, without measuring, which line is longer. And though we are likely to
know, from previous experience, that they are precisely the same length, virtually everyone
will see the upper line as longer. Similarly, we see the centre of the star image in Figure
2.1c as being much whiter and brighter than the paper outside the lines, although in fact
there is no difference at all. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman calls this predilection to
produce what we see an ‘elaborate fabrication’, and writes that we don’t see what is there,
but only ‘how things appear to me’ (Hoffman 1998: 6). That is to say, we see relationally—
when we observe something that really exists in the material world and relate with our
view of it to bring it into our meaning world. We also see in a phenomenal sense—when we

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see visions, mirages or other ‘imagined’ things, for instance, and also when we construct
what we see gestaltically (Hoffman 1998: 6). This means that we do not see, even in
neurophysiological terms, simply what is there; instead, we are confronted with an
incredible variety of possibilities.

This is partly to do with the construction of the eye and the physiology of seeing.
The eye is constantly in motion, so we can’t really fix our gaze in any prolonged manner or
produce an arrested image, as is possible through technological imaging. Instead, our
brains must make up an image out of constantly changing, and often scanty, clues (lines,
signs). Nor do we see in a neat frame, but are always reframing as we move our eyes across
a scene or object, and as we move our heads or bodies within the viewing field. Further, we
have binocular vision: we have two eyes but see only one image (or, rather, the brain
decodes the image seen by each eye into a single impression). Binocular vision means that
we are always seeing the world from two perspectives, triangulated; this means we have a
large field vision, better peripheral vision than we would have if we were monocular, and
the ability to perceive distance, depth and three-dimensionality. We also have a ‘blind spot’,
the macula, which prevents our taking in a whole visual field without constant scanning
and comparison of what we see (Gombrich 1982: 50). And the structure of the eye means
we only see an image sharply at its centre, unlike a camera where, if the lens aperture is set
to allow great depth of field, the photo will show everything in the frame with equal clarity
and focus (Snyder 1980: 505).

Given the problems inherent in receiving an image of what is actually out there,
what is there to prevent us from making up everything we see idiosyncratically? Why is it
that virtually everyone would see the top line in Figure 2.2 as longer than the lower line?
According to Hoffman, it is because perception is governed by a kind of grammar: ‘We see
the same things because we construct the same things. And we construct the same things
because we use the same rules of construction’ (Hoffman 1998: 74). These rules, for
Hoffman, are physiological—to do with brain function.

Seeing in the World

But in fact we don’t consistently see the same things in the same way. For instance,
we went to an art gallery a few years ago to see an exhibition of the works of hyperrealist
artist Jeffrey Smart (see thumbnails of his work at
www.philipbacon.com.au/artist/smart/smart-p1.html). After spending an hour or so
looking at his various cityscapes, with their blocks of colour and fine attention to detail, we
sat in the gallery’s café, looking out across the inner cityscape, and saw it not in terms of
itself (a collection of office buildings and apartment blocks, the loop of roads around the
harbour, the harbour bridge) but as framed, with each window of each apartment building
seeming to have been placed there according to the rules of hyperrealist perspective. We
saw not with our own eyes and in accordance with everyday scanning of a familiar scene,
but as though we were looking at a flat representation of the city, artificially heightened
and alive, perfect and yet somehow slightly awry.

The point of this story is not simply to compound what we have been discussing
about the tendency of eye and brain to conduct ‘elaborate fabrications’; rather, it is an
example of how cultural frameworks interlace with the physiological when we read our
surroundings. John Berger writes that seeing is more than just the work of the eye and
brain; it is also, importantly, relational. We see what we look at, and we see it not just in
and of itself, but in relation to ourselves: how close it is to us; how it makes us feel; how it

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fits into our current state of mind and social framework. ‘Our vision,’ Berger writes, ‘is
continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself,
constituting what is present to us as we are’ (1972: 9). This is pretty much what was
happening when we looked out and saw not a living city, but a Jeffrey Smart image. We had
not seen it that way before, and perhaps will never see it that way again; but for that
moment, because of the way in which our eyes had been ‘set’ by a cultural influence, we
couldn’t see it in any other way.

What is happening in this sort of experience? We can identify here another

component to the physiology of vision—something which is not just the function of the
nervous system, but isn’t just a personal quirk of vision either. Rather, it is a blend of the
personal, the physiological and the cultural. French theorists like Blaise Pascal, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu describe and analyse ways of understanding the world
that help us to make sense of our experience because their work insists that we aren’t just
the sum of the electrical impulses in our brains; and we aren’t just the sum of everything
our culture says people ought to be. Rather, we are beings who live in bodies and who have
emotional lives which affect our sense of the world—what we see, how we see it and what
it means to us. If you’re myopic, for instance, you see the world in soft focus— you see a
different world from that seen by your friends with 20/20 vision, and your sense of the
world is different because of your body and its abilities, compared with theirs. And this
happens all the time, in all sorts of ways: when you’re ill, the very air may appear faintly
yellow; when you’re inebriated, objects in front of you seem to weave and sway; when
you’re deep in thought, the world becomes fuzzy and indistinct; and when you’re elated it
may well appear bright and clean, regardless of how it actually is. As Pierre Bourdieu
writes: ‘The relation to the world is a relation of presence in the world, of being in the
world, in the sense of belonging to the world’ (Bourdieu 2000: 114). So we see and perceive
not because we are looking at the world from the outside, as it were, but because we are
part of everything within our gaze.

Tacit Seeing

This ‘everything’ includes our habitus (our background, tastes, tendencies and
dispositions) as well as our physical aptitude and status. What we can take from this is that
the ability to see, and the ways in which we make sense of what we see, are firstly
neurophysiological—we need the ability to capture and process images, and transfer them
to the brain. But what we choose to look at and see, and where our focus lies, have a
different point of origin, which is dependent on the body but influenced by individual tastes
and dispositions, and the cultural framework in which our ideas, values and habits are laid
down. We see, in short, under the principle of constancy: ‘past experiences of the viewer
will influence what is perceived’ (Wallschlaeger and Busic-Snyder 1992: 307). As an
example, in the 1980s the BBC produced a film based on a research project conducted by a
group of British sociologists (screened in 1987). Part of their experiment was a kind of play
staged on the public transport system, where a pair of young white men entered a carriage
and ‘mugged’ a black man. The members of the public sitting in the carriage were
interviewed about what they had seen, and an embarrassingly high proportion of the white
respondents reported that the black man had been the mugger. What they saw and how
they processed it was framed not just by neurological processes, but by the cultural
environment and its values and rules (which valued white people over people of colour,
and attributed criminal tendencies to the latter), and by their own habitus (which clearly
generated racist attitudes). In short, they saw what they expected to see—or, as Bates

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Lowry (1967: 13) might have put it, their visual perception was to seeing as babbling is to
speaking: they looked without really seeing.

At times, we all look without seeing; this is often necessary to allow us to get
through each day. Think of the act of walking, for instance. If I focus on the individual
movements and moments of balance, I’ll probably fall over, but if I simply walk along, I will
be able to cross a road without any major disasters or embarrassments. Similarly, if I had to
pay careful attention to every aspect of everything in my visual field, I wouldn’t be able to
make sense of anything: I’d be overwhelmed with visual stimuli. So, instead of carefully
thinking about each movement of foot and leg while walking, or focusing analytically on
each thing before my eyes while seeing, I tend to function according to a conscious–
unconsciousness: what Michael Polanyi terms ‘tacit knowing’ (Polanyi and Prosch 1975:
34), which means having just enough awareness of walking, or seeing, to achieve an aim (to
cross the road, to read a novel). Tacit knowing, or tacit seeing, allows us to function despite
the fact that we are constantly being distracted—our eyes are always being captured by
something new across the way; our attention is easily diverted by noises and other
sensations; our moods and prejudices colour what we see.

Seeing as Literacy

Tacit seeing is fine if we simply want to get through the day’s responsibilities and
activities, but it is insufficient if we want or need to make sense of what we are seeing. As
an analogy, consider the processes of communicating in language. The school system trains
children to develop sophisticated literacies in the various components of written
language—we learn the shapes of letters, we learn the look of words, we learn grammar
and syntax— and, with these literacies (and discipline-specific training), we can write or
read anything from abstract philosophy to shopping lists. If we are to develop similar skills
in the manipulation and interpretation of visual texts, then we must again learn a number
of skills and knowledges—or literacies. Just as we needed to learn how individual letters
were shaped, we need to learn how to produce and read the basic components of visual
texts—point, line and plane. Point is the simplest visual element: it has location, but no
dimension. Line is a point in motion, and is one-dimensional—only able to extend along
one direction. Plane is two-dimensional, having both length and width. Together with the
effects of light, hue and colour saturation, tonal value, texture and scale, dimension and
motion, these three elements make up the visual field we observe, and convey the
impression of density, movement and dimension. By knowing these elements, and how
they are combined, we have the basic skills to read visual texts.

Look, for example, at the image reproduced in Figure 2.2, Enzo Plazzato’s ‘Jeté’. We
can identify line, plane, light and texture in the outline of the shape, the sweep of limbs and
fabric, the texture of material, the varying density of light across the curves—particularly
the hair, muscles and ribs. We can also identify dimension by comparing one part of the
object with another. Motion is implied by the arrangement of the whole—most viewers
would read it as an arrested moment in mid-leap. Its title, ‘Jeté’ (a ballet step), tells us what
is happening, but even without the caption there is no doubt that this is someone in full
flight. An utterly still statue, reproduced here in an utterly still photograph, calls up
movement because of the combination of line, texture and bodily organisation.

But knowledge of lines, planes and other elements is not enough on its own. One of
the technologies of visuality is depth, which is in fact physiologically unattainable. The eye
sees only two dimensions, and has to manufacture depth on the basis of the clues before it

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(Hoffman 1998: 23). We make the assumption, with our twodimensional eyes and from this
two-dimensional reproduction, that this is a statue in three dimensions because of the way
light falls on the curves, and because of the density of the colour against the lightness of the
sky/background. A second very important technology of seeing, related to depth, is
dimensionality, which is practically impossible to read in an image without additional cues.
We can’t, for example, tell by looking at the photo of ‘Jeté’, how large the statue is, how high
it is elevated, or what the distance actually is between the viewer and the statue.
Insufficient clues have been incorporated to allow us to guess this aspect reliably. By
adding in other literacies, we might be able to clarify some of these. We can assume it is
probably elevated (because it seems to have been shot from below), and we can assume it
is relatively large, firstly because it must be quite high to have so much clear sky above it in
the middle of a city, and secondly because we can assume that the building against which it
is photographed is a major city edifice.

If we do not know how the visual elements are combined, we will not be able to read
a visual text: contemporary researchers, for instance, can only make educated guesses
about the meanings of cave paintings, particularly those that are non-representational
(comprising lines and dots rather than figures). People are always subjective mark-makers,
and subjective readers of marks. But what of a more objective viewing machine, the
camera? This is a form of visual technology with which most people are very familiar, and
which seemed at first to offer the promise of a rational vision, one uncoloured by the
vagaries of neurological perception, the limits of eye function, and the personal distractions
and tacit seeing that affect human beings. With photography, none of these obtain because
the camera simply focuses on the image and records it, freezing time in what ought,
logically, to be a true and pure account of the space in front of the lens.

Of course, it does not fulfil this promise. For the most part we treat photographs as
though they produce ‘a perfectly realistic and objective recording of the visible world’
(Bourdieu et al. 1990: 74), but the more skilled we become in taking, processing and
reading photographs, the more aware we are that a photo is just another image that shows
us what we want—or have chosen—to see. We only photograph the things we want to keep
as memories: weddings, the stages of our children’s development, the kitchen before and
after the renovations. As we discussed in the previous chapter, we carefully select what will
be in our photographs, and edit out those elements we don’t want to recall. And by using
the appropriate computer program, we can digitally manipulate pictures—lift elements
out, drop elements in, sharpen up the image, change the colour. Photography has not
shown us a pure image uninflected by taste, habitus, neurological distortions or other
distractions, but has instead given us another way of representing the things about us that
must still be rendered sensible, or readable: it produces a visual text which is more or less
true to the object depending on how we look, what we know and what we expect to see.

Still, an image does not need to replicate its subject to be a good likeness, or to be
read as such. Look, for example, at the ukiyo-ewoodblock print reproduced in Figure 2.3.
None of us has ever seen a man who looked precisely like this man, and yet he is
immediately recognisable as a person—and as a person with specific features of gender
and age. Although this print obeys none of the Western rules of visual culture in that period
(it was first published in a book dated 1770), and although it is very flat and stylised
compared with the narrative realism that characterised European eighteenth-century
works or with contemporary photographs, we can identify its content (and this without
being trained in eighteenth-century Japanese culture, the oeuvre of the artist or the
mannered cultivated world reflected in the ukiyo-e art). We can see, for instance, that the
man represented here is in motion—less dramatically than the young man in ‘Jeté’, but he

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is pictured in the moment of turning to look over his shoulder at something. And if asked
what is going on, we might say that ‘a man in courtly dress is turning around’. In fact, of
course, there is no movement at all; this is what Gombrich calls an ‘arrested image’ (1982:
248).

Arresting Reality

The arrested image is most often associated with the field of photography because
photographs perfectly freeze time and motion in a way that no other art form really
achieves. Paul Virilio (1994: 2) cites the sculptor Rodin to the effect that paintings and
sculptures (any non-photographic art) effectively convey the sense of movement because
they don’t freeze time, as does a photo. Rather, paintings or sculptures—or woodblock
prints—rely on the eye movements of the viewer to convey the appearance of movement.
We read the statue of Jeté, running our eyes across the sweep of limb to capture a sense of
the leap. We run our eyes over the ukiyo-eprint, looking back to see what has caught the
man’s attention. Because time doesn’t really ever stand still, so Virilio’s argument goes, a
photograph—which freezes time and motion—is ‘false’ in this respect. Martin Jay takes a
similar line, writing that photographs rob ‘life’s flowing temporality by introducing a kind
of visual rigor mortis’ (Jay 1993: 134). Our eyes, as we noted above, are always moving;
time too is always moving, and with it the material objects on which we gaze. Because the
camera freezes a moment, it reminds us that time is constantly passing, yet we treat the
arrested motion as a falsehood, and behave as though the movement in a painting is ‘true’.

This is curious, because in other respects we typically behave as though

photographs show ‘exactly what happened’—what Barthes called ‘the reality effect’. We
look to the photo finish shot to confirm an uncertain end to a race, for instance, and to
candid shots to show the moment ‘as it was’. But photographs are not, in fact, necessarily
true to how we think something should or does look. Think of the numbers of passport
photographs that do not look anything like the person whose identity they confirm; or how
subjects will often shriek with horror or mirth at how they appear in snapshots. This is
partly a matter of the subject’s vanity, no doubt, but there is a degree to which this
response is valid: the instantaneous, unstaged photograph cannot show us what we think
we saw, because it freezes time while we see in time. This is why movie stills
photographers will stage shots from scenes, rather than just run the camera and select a
single frame. Whenever time and motion are frozen, things are shown out of place—
someone may be in motion, but the freeze effect means they are shown with a leg hanging
in mid-air; someone else may be speaking, but the freeze effect means their mouth appears
to gape vacantly; and there is always someone whose eyes are closed. In real time, the
viewer would not notice this; it would be part of the whole moment, in motion. But in a
photograph, it can be horribly evident.

The unreality of so many photographs is also based on proximity and perspective—

as we discussed in Chapter 1—which can show us the world in an unfamiliar way, and from
unexpected angles. Such work disturbs viewers partly because it jolts us out of our
complacency about our lived environment and its spatial dimensions; such photos trouble
us because they show us the world in a way that we don’t (think we) actually see it. Just the
tilting of a lens can render a building oddly foreshortened, and moving in very close to an
object changes its appearance. In Figure 2.4 we see an ordinary fork, foreshortened and
massified. The close-up photo means the fine scratches on the tines are rendered here into
a kind of cross-hatching, which catches the viewer’s attention and produces the effect of
texture. The tone—or the degree of darkness or lightness caused by light reflecting off the

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surface of the tines—communicates a pattern of depth and intensity. The lighter and
brighter parts seem closer, the darker parts recede, the shadow at the top left conveys an
impression of depth, and the intensity of the black-and-white tines against the grainy grey
background creates an effect of the solidity and volume of metal against air. The proximity
means the shape of the fork as a fork is lost, so that it becomes first an object of the gaze,
and only subsequently decoded to be seen as an everyday object. Together, the angle and
play of light, and the limited depth of field, focusing attention on the light curves of the
tines, mean that the fork is presented in a heroic guise, with a sweep of metal and balance
of light and dark that makes it appear to be like no other fork we have seen.

This may seem a surprisingly ‘ordinary’ example, but it demonstrates how easy it is
to defamiliarise the familiar. American poet Charles Simic remembers sending off a series
of poems to a literary magazine and receiving the reply, ‘Dear Mr Simic . . . you’re obviously
a sensible young man, so why do you waste your time by writing about knives, spoons and
forks?’ One of Simic’s poems describes a fork as:

This strange thing must have crept

Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless and blind.

Space and Perspective

All the same, there is a truth to reality presented by photography, and it is the truth
based on what Gombrich calls ‘the eye-witness principle’ (1982: 253). As Gombrich
explains it, the eye-witness principle was developed by the ancient Greeks (to whom we
owe so much of what we know about vision), and it means simply that everything in shot or
frame is what a viewer would have seen if standing in the same place, and at the same time,
as the camera recorded the image. It is a reality that is not a reality, because no one can
stand perfectly still and gaze undistractedly at one spot. Our eyes don’t allow it because
they are always in motion and because we are binocular. Test this by looking at something
close to you, and then alternately opening and closing each eye: the object will seem to shift
across your field of vision, you will have much less depth of vision, and less will be visible.
Monocular vision has only one perspective and hence flattens out the field of vision to one
dimension. So for the eye-witness principle really to work, the viewer would have had to
stand still, look directly at—and only at— the object in shot and, unless the object were
distant, close one eye (Gombrich 1982: 258). Despite this, the eye-witness principle is the
foundation for the whole study of perspective which was realised in the Renaissance and
dominated visual art until the nineteenth century.
Perspective in visual images means that the arrangement and relative size of objects
is true to the eye-witness principle, so that the whole image is dependent upon the point of
view of the potential beholder. John Berger describes it in wonderfully simple terms,
writing that the gaze of the viewer ‘is like a beam from a lighthouse— only instead of the
light travelling outward, appearances travel in . . . Perspective makes the single eye the
center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of
infinity’ (Berger 1972: 16). Linear perspective as we now understand it begins with the

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Renaissance artists’ development of proportional systems, and their attempt to create a
simulation of the actual vista and thus achieve beauty and order in art works.
Of course, perspective had been understood much earlier than the Renaissance: the
artists of this period, many historians insist, rediscovered it from the writings and art
works of antiquity (Veltman 1998). They cite as evidence the writings of the ancients
(especially Euclid) on various mathematical principles known in the ancient world, on
shapes like the cone and the pyramid, and on the design of Greek temples, urns, statues and
other works (Wallschlaeger and Busic-Snyder 1992: 220). The approach to perspective
used in the ancient world is not precisely the same as the linear perspective pioneered by
Renaissance artists, however. Ancient Roman and Greek artists tended just to use
techniques like foreshortening and the diminution of objects within pictorial space to
designate their position and proximity. Renaissance artists, in contrast, used geometrical
plotting in their attempt to show the world ‘as it really is’, and to replicate depth in two
dimensions. Central to their approach was the intersection of lines at a specific vanishing
point on the horizon, which created the effect of depth and dimension—the effect of
looking through a frame, or a window, on to the real world.
The ‘reality’ of this effect, though, is a fantasy: we do not in fact see in perspective
because, as we noted in reference to the eyewitness principle, this would demand a
monocular view—we would have to stand in one spot and close one eye to see the world in
linear perspective. So, despite the apparent naturalness, or ‘truth to referent’, that
perspectival images present, Gombrich insists that perspective ‘does violence to the way
we see the world’ (1982: 258). And it is in fact not ‘natural’: it is first a mathematical and
technical system, and only then an artistic system, and it makes use of geometric ratios and
specialised perspectival instruments to produce internal balance, harmony of elements and
the effect of photographic realism. It works extremely well. Look, for example, at the
photograph of the train in Figure 2.5, which shows linear perspective in the way the
railway lines, the lines of the train and its carriage and the horizon lines of the tops of the
shrubbery all implicitly converge at the vanishing point. The relative size of the various
objects in the shot also heightens the perspectival effect, with the size of the stones in the
foreground compared with the miniaturised train in the background indicating both the
distance between the two, and their relative proximity to the implicit viewing position.
Together the elements and their organisation within the frame convey an impression of the
world laid out before us, and an impression of spatiality.
Linear perspective is, then, a powerful reality effect, because it mimics the way in
which we seem to see in normal vision. It is also a political gesture: European linear
perspective developed and was used to privilege order and a particular ideal of beauty. In
doing so, it obeyed and supported the important stories and values—especially Christian
stories and values—that were dominant at the time. The spatial harmony of linear
perspective, for instance, reflected the symbolic harmony of the world in God’s order. The
regular pattern of lines disappearing to the vanishing point on the horizon alludes to a
point beyond which we cannot see—the horizon where objects disappear—and thus offers
the promise of a reality beyond what we can see. Also, much of the art created in the late
Medieval and Renaissance period comprised representations of Bible stories; more
‘realistic’ representations made the stories seem more true, supporting the principles of
Christian faith. Ernst Gombrich writes, in Means and Ends, of ‘the increasing demand for
what I have called dramatic evocation, the return to the desire not to be told only what
happened according to the Scriptures but how it happened, what events must have looked
like to an eyewitness’ (Gombrich 1976: 32). Linear perspective, by putting the viewer of a
Bible painting into the position of eye-witness, ‘proved’ the truth of the story (‘it must be
true: I saw it with my own eyes’).

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Beyond Linearity
We should avoid the temptation to collapse all forms of linear perspective under a
single logic, however. Just because something looks as though it is obeying similar rules of
internal order doesn’t mean that it is attempting to do the same sorts of things. Other
cultures may use elements of linear perspective, but with a different set of imperatives.
Japanese ukiyo-e (‘floating world’) woodprints, an example of which was reproduced in
Figure 2.3, are generally considered by art historians to have been developed out of
Chinese woodblock prints which incorporated a Western (linear) perspective. It would be
common sense, one might argue, to say that the ukiyo-eworks are therefore not really
Japanese, but are inherently ‘like’ both their Chinese and Western antecedents. But this
really can’t be supported if we look at the works. As we can see in the print by Bunchô in
Figure 2.3, it is not ‘realistic’ in Western terms— remember that this was produced at
about the same time when Western artists like the Spaniard Francisco Goya were
producing ‘realistic’ images that incorporated the vanishing point and geometrical
arrangement associated with linear perspective (see thumbnails of Goya’s etchings at
www.artgalleryone.com/Goya/LosDesastres. htm). Nor does it convey the volumetric
quality (depth and threedimensionality) sought by so many Western artists. Moreover, to
argue that the meanings and logic are the same because a similar technique is being used
would be to do a violence to what Japanese writers at the time considered these ukiyo-e
prints were representing, and how they were representing it. The point and the context of
the ukiyo-e works were to represent the ‘floating world’ of the Japanese court in the
seventeenth century, to capture the life and values and aspirations of the people. Ryoi,
writing in 1661, described the world which is pictured by the ukiyo-e artists:

Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon,
the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine
diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; caring not a whit for the pauperism
staring us in the face, refusing to be disenheartened, like a guard floating with the
river current: this is what we call the floating world. (cited in Veltman 1998)

This story of the ukiyo-e does not, then, bear a resemblance to contemporary works in
Europe or, arguably, in Africa or Oceania.
Still, every work has perspective of some sort, according to Panofsky (1991: 41)—it
need not necessarily be the vanishing point perspective associated with the Western
tradition, but it must deal with space and relation. Maps are one of the several important
visual technologies that render space, and permit a knowledge of place to viewers with
appropriate literacies. Although a map looks nothing like the landscape or cityscape it
represents, the symbols (the post office sign, the one-way arrows on appropriate roads, the
blue squiggle of a river) and scale tell us how to navigate its space. Michel de Certeau writes
about these various perspectives, in his work on spatial practices. He begins his chapter by
looking down on Manhattan from a skyscraper high above the city, and writes of ‘this
pleasure of “seeing the whole”, of looking down on, totalising the most immoderate of
human texts’ (1984: 92). In fact, by looking down on to the city, much as cartography
insists we look down from a very high point, the city is reduced from living world into
semi-static text. Those at ground level, though, see a very different ‘text’: ‘they are walkers .
. . whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” without being able to read it’
(Certeau 1984: 93). Urban walkers pick their way blindly with regard to the whole
text/map of the city; map readers in a sense are blind with regard to the everydayness of

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moving about on the streets, but maps give them considerable literacies about the abstract
shape of the space, and relation of road and bridge and building.
Other kinds of perspective are found in many video games, especially those which
make use of high-quality graphics to convey the player through the story and action of the
game. The Age of Emperors series, for example, manages several types of perspective, and
demands sophisticated visual ability of its readers/ users. Much of the matter on screen has
a simple two-dimensional perspective: it is just iconography or text, printed on the screen
as it might have been printed on paper—the player’s score in the bottom right corner; the
portrait and name of the protagonist at bottom left; the ‘life’ and energy icons at the top;
the simple story of the game, or sometimes instructions on the rules of the game, crawling
along the very bottom of the screen. Off to centre right is a simple map of the fantasy world,
showing where the protagonist is in relation to topographical features—another two-
dimensional rendering of space, representing the folds, dimensions and curves of the world
on a flat screen, as a flat object. This two-dimensional perspective lays out information
which is there not for focused attention, but for quick scanning before and while the player
gets on with the real object: playing the game. For this, the graphic resorts to three-
dimensional effect, because the point of it is to secure the player’s attention, and draw the
player into the world of the game—a world that satisfies the demands of reality effect. It
does this by unfolding the action of the game across the whole screen (overlapped in places
by the basic two-dimensional information) as a movie-like image, with characters running,
leaping and fighting in a picture plane that makes use of linear perspective to render depth
and space. At heightened moments, the perspective is distorted for dramatic effect: a sword
sweeping through the air trails its shadow behind it, more like a still cartoon than a moving
image—a technique that attributes great power to the swordsman, because it appears that
the very air has been shattered by the stroke. The spatial dimensions of the game/story
world are heightened by the use of atmospheric perspective—the further away objects or
people should be, the fuzzier their focus becomes. At times the game graphics makes use of
forced perspective—a moment of great rage, or powerful gesture or great speed on the part
of a character is rendered by bending the objects about them, and distorting their ‘real’
spatial relation to the character form; all attention is centred on the character, and the
viewer feels physically hauled into the scene. These various uses of perspective are
combined to provide the whole world of the game: an all-involving experience that means
the player can become entirely absorbed by the act first of seeing/watching and, allied with
that, of causing the objects in the field of vision to move in predictable ways.

New Technologies of Seeing

Added to the questions of perception that stem from the multiplicity of perspective
and attitude, the uncertainty about neurological processing of the visual field, and the
impact of our habitus on what and how we see are the effects of the many mechanical aids
to vision that have been developed over the centuries. Arguably, it was the invention of
technological viewing devices that put the lid on the notion that what we see is what is
really there. Martin Jay cites the film critic, JeanLouis Comolli, in this regard:

At the very same time that it is thus fascinated and gratified by the multiplicity of
scopic instruments which lay a thousand views beneath its gaze, the human eye
loses its immemorial privilege; the mechanical eye of the photographic machine
now sees in its place, and in certain aspects with more sureness. The photograph
stands as at once the triumph and the grave of the eye . . . Decentered, in panic,
thrown into confusion by all this new magic of the visible, the human eye finds itself
affected with a series of limits and doubts. (Jay 1995: 350)

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 Technology is defined variously, of course. We understand it to be a range of objects
(tools, and other instruments and devices) and we understand it as a sort of knowledge—
‘know-how’ and skill. Technology can also be understood as an organising principle and a
process—the way in which a society constitutes itself and its formations, and then brings
people and machines together to produce goods and services. The current era is marked by
an incredible range of visual technologies, using all the senses of the term presented above.
It includes the older forms of film, video and television; the newer ones of computers, the
internet and virtual reality; and the ‘scientific’ mechanisms of microscope, telescope and
digital imaging.
But technology is not a twentieth-century phenomenon. Optical technologies dating
from the Renaissance and earlier laid the ground for contemporary visual technologies
which allow us not only to see better, further and closer, but also to store images and hence
retrieve visual memories. Many of the technologies developed centuries ago are still in use
now. The perspective window, for example, is literally a window—a pane of glass—
through which the artist can observe the subject, and on which the image in the picture
field can be traced. This instrument, written about by Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth
century, still has applications: some contemporary computer drawing programs use the
same principle, showing objects in a scene from the virtual camera’s point of view and
ensuring that those objects closest to the viewer are largest, and that the vanishing point is
always in the centre of the picture field. Another very ancient device still in use today (in a
developed form) is the camera obscura (literally, ‘dark room’). Effectively, it involved
allowing a pinhole of light to enter a darkened space and reflect on the opposite wall,
where the image reflected will be upside-down. This instrument was described by the fifth-
century BCE Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti and the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher
Aristotle, and later described by Leonardo da Vinci, though it wasn’t developed into a
portable device until the seventeenth century, when it was widely used by artists as a
drawing tool. With a few amendments—notably the addition of light-sensitive paper on the
reflective wall—the camera obscura became the photographic camera still used today.
Just as technology is not new, it is not something divorced from people, or just a tool
to be picked up and discarded at will. Technology is irreducibly social, because people and
technological objects together produce our everyday life world. Sigmund Freud insisted
that technology is an extension of human being, making us ‘prosthetic gods’—a notion
taken up by the nineteenth-century philosopher of technology, Ernst Kapp, who saw the
new communication technologies (railways, telegraphs) as externalising, or extending, the
human body’s circulatory and nervous systems (Ebersole 1995).
It is important, though, to avoid notions of technological determinism: as Z ˇizˇek
writes, the effect of technology on our lives ‘does not depend directly on technology, it
results from the way the impact of new technology is refracted by the social relations’ (Z
ˇizˇek 1996: 198). Like all the things we do that are social, cultural and economic, cultural
politics and dominant ways of organising the world will shape our possibilities. Still, artists
have long picked up on the possibilities offered by technology to do what they do: produce
images. Even as early as the Renaissance, people like Leonardo da Vinci moved freely
between explorations of technology and art (Rybczynski 1983: 12).
An example of this interface between the human and the machine, and of art’s ability
to overlap the two, is shown in Figure 2.7. Here we see the torso of a man overlaid with
what might be neon lighting tubes, or computer components. The human is rendered part
of the machine—a cybernetic being. And (in a sort of Freudian joke) a carrot is laid upon
the genital region of the man, and labelled ‘this is not a carrot’. Here we have an obvious
visual gag (when is a carrot not a carrot? When it’s a penis) with several intertextual

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references: Freud’s discussion of slips of the tongue and jokes (he uses as an example the
joke ‘When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar’); and Magritte’s famous painting ‘This is
Not a Pipe’ (thumbnail at www.uwrf.edu/history/prints/ magritte-pipe.html) both in the
title and in the construction of the carrot image. What is interesting about this work is that
the human disappears, effectively, as human; there is no face, there are no eyes, so there is
no way of making a contact or identification. Instead, there is simply the body and its
wiring, presented as a kind of sexual object, but rather more as a technological object—a
machine that lacks hands, feet and face (and penis) and therefore is operable only through
its technological interface.
What we can take from this is that technology is not just know-how, or designed
devices; it is also a verb, a principle of action. Movies provide perhaps the best—because
they are the most familiar—example of this. A movie, Vivian Sobchack insists, ‘is an act of
seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical
and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood’ (Sobchack 1995:
37). But it doesn’t simply act on us; rather, it acts in us, interfacing with us in the
production of a visual/visceral experience. When we watch a horror film, for instance, our
eyes are functioning to perceive the matter on the screen, and our brain is decoding what
we see; but at the same time our emotions are brought into play, our heart is racing, our
stomach is twisting, our whole self is involved in what is no more than the play of light and
sound.

Conclusion
The technologies of vision range from the viewer’s neurological system through our
embodied dispositions, the effect of the world upon us, the effect of our own habitus, the
perspective from which we view an image, the lines, textures and colour of an image to the
use of optical instruments which render the world in a particular way. These latter
devices—visual technologies which have continued to be developed from the ancient world
right through to the twenty-first century—have changed the way we see, and the way we
perceive ourselves and/in the world, by providing frames, focus and both monocular and
linear perspectives. Now the digital manipulation of images extends the whole argument
further, contributing to a growing crisis not just of vision, but of meaning and being.
Dinosaurs lumber across screens, moving precisely like living creatures; and in texts like
Tomb Raider, confections of pixels—v-actors (virtual actors)—are becoming almost
indistinguishable from human actors. No visual image can be trusted, because all are
potentially able to be digitally enhanced or manipulated.
In this chapter we have ranged across these many technologies of perception to
explain something of the physical and cultural determinants of seeing. The fact that we see
at all coherently seems quite extraordinary, given the multitude of aspects possible and
technologies that inflect our visual field. But we do, for the most part, and for the most part
we make sense of—render ‘real’—the things we see. The bio-engineer Leif Finkel writes of
the perplexities of vision:

We grope our way, largely in the dark, about our respective caves. The world, to a
large extent, is a vision of our own creation. We inhabit a mixed world of sensation
and interpretation, and the boundary between them is never openly revealed to us.
And amid this tenuous situation, our cortex makes up little stories about the world,
and softly hums them to us to keep us from getting scared at night. (Finkel 1992:
404)

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 The ‘groping in the dark’ which Finkel writes about has attracted the attention of
philosophers, psychologists, medical practitioners and other ‘experts’ over the last century;
they are all fascinated by how it is that we see, and make sense of ourselves and of the
world through this mixture of ‘sensation and interpretation’. In the next chapter we trace
some of the main arguments about visual culture, and how in different periods people have
made sense of the processes of sight and perception.

Synthesizing Your Knowledge

Note: Your activity will be sent by the instructor.

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 UNIT 4
COMMUNICATION AND THE VISUAL

Overview

We have argued that seeing is a kind of reading, one which makes use of
particular technologies and various skills in framing, selecting, editing and decoding the
visual material that surrounds us. Perhaps no one really needs finely honed skills to
function in the ordinary sense as a visual being— indeed, most of the time people get along
just by relying on habitual ways of seeing and making sense of what they see. Visual
literacy, in contrast, is a very complex practice which demands more than just everyday
practices: it requires specific skills in the processes of seeing and reading, the relationship
between representation and reality, and the ways in which visual experiences are also
moments of communication.

Because of this complexity, the principles and processes of perception have engaged
the attention of scholars across the history of Western culture. In this chapter, we trace
some of the central ideas of why we decode texts in particular ways, and how the ‘truth’
effect (or reality effect) of visual experience works to communicate ideas and ideologies
within cultures. Underpinning our approach is the argument that if we wish to observe in a
more analytical and selfreflexive way—and understand why we see things the way we
do—then we need to learn how to defamiliarise the process of seeing. We can do so by
developing the literacies that allow us to recognise the extent to which we see through the
frames of our cultural location, and by developing skills in analysing how visual culture acts
as a medium of communication.

Learning Objectives
At the end of the unit, I am able to:
1. explain the strong connection of the subject and meaning in Visual Art; and,
2. analyze the realistic significance of a Visual Art.

Expanding Your Knowledge

The Seeing Subject

Seeing is on the one hand an automatic, physiological function we perform without
thinking and, on the other, a complex and absorbing process. Eyes in particular fascinate
us. They are the ‘windows to the soul’; parents tell their children to ‘look me in the eye’ as
proof that they aren’t lying; lovers and flirters use eye contact to seize, hold and caress the
object of their desire. And writers, philosophers and social scientists have long wrestled
with what it means to be ‘seeing subjects’: human beings whose feature characteristics are
that they access the physical and intellectual world through vision.

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 Seeing, and making sense of what we see, are thus neither simple nor natural.
Indeed, the art historian Bates Lowry notes that our ability to see is similar to our ability to
speak: ‘We are not born with a knowledge of how to see, any more than we are born with a
knowledge of how to speak English. We are born only with the ability to learn how’ (1967:
13). W.T.J. Mitchell extends this sense of the complexity of seeing, by drawing a distinction
between reading (‘decipherment, decoding, interpretation’) and spectatorship, or ‘just
looking’ (Mitchell 1994: 16). Provided we have the physiological ability, we can all look;
however, our ability to ‘read’ or ‘see’ (that is, to interpret) is contingent: what we see is not
what we get— rather, it is what our eyes have been socialised to see, and our minds to
interpret.
So what we make of what we see is determined by our cultural context, our own
habitus, what we know about how meanings are made in our culture and the particular
field in which we are ‘seeing’. Victor Burgin explains this in writing about the act of looking
at a photograph of a set of stones: ‘If I go on to remark that the photograph depicts a
temple, that the temple is ruined, and that it is Greek, then I am relying upon knowledge
that is no longer “natural”, “purely visual”; I am relying upon knowledge that is cultural,
verbally transmitted and, in the final analysis, ideological’ (Burgin 1999: 45). We are not
just living creatures who notice what is around us, but subjects—individuals in society—
who learn to see in particular ways, and for particular purposes.
The twentieth century produced a number of critics and theorists, from several
fields and disciplines, whose work deals extensively with how we see, what we make of
what we see and what it means to be a ‘seeing subject’. Whether they were concerned with
individual identity or with how societies more generally are organised, each turns to an
idea about visuality to explain what it means to be human. So, as W.T.J. Mitchell writes:
mental imagery belongs to psychology and epistemology; optical imagery to
physics; graphic, sculptural, and architectural imagery to the art historian; verbal
imagery to the literary critic; perceptual images occupy a kind of border region
where physiologists, neurologists, psychologists, art historians, and students of
optics find themselves collaborating with philosophers and literary critics. (Mitchell
1986: 10–11)
We can, for example, read the works of American psychologist and philosopher
William James for examples of how neurological/ physiological information makes sense of
how people see and what this means about how they understand themselves and their
world. Or we can read psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysts like Jacques
Lacan for examples of how, in their disciplines, images are considered central to an
individual’s personality and behaviour. Freud made much of the deviance he called
‘scopophilia’, or the desiring gaze we bend upon the world—‘I am what I desire; and I
desire what I gaze upon’ (1905)—while Lacan, who followed and developed Freud’s
theories, argued that identity emerges at what he calls the ‘mirror stage’ (Lacan 1977), the
point at which a small child can recognise itself as an individual, separate from its mother
and from all the other matter of the world.

Other writers have explored visual culture to explain broader issues of society and
culture. Anthropologists such as Claude LéviStrauss, for example, make sense of the life,
values and organisation of traditional cultures by analysing the sorts of clothes they wear,
the shape of the dwellings they build, and the colours, lines and textures of their decorative
art. Cultural theorists like Stuart Hall take a similar approach in analysing contemporary
cultures: they argue that the way in which visual objects are produced and displayed, and
what counts as beautiful or as valuable tell us a great deal about what that society’s values
are, what sort of meanings (or stories) are dominant, and who has power in the
community. And theorists of spatiality, such as Henri Lefebvre, analyse visual culture as

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data that can be used to explain everyday life. The interior design and the scale of a home
or public building, for example, give clues to the value of the individuals who occupy those
spaces; the design of a map can show how a society understands space and dimensions.
During the second half of the twentieth century, writers like Fredric Jameson and Jean
Baudrillard analysed visual culture as instances of what is called postmodernism: a set of
theories and practices which describe the contemporary world as a kind of MTV clip, a
plethora of images whirling in promiscuous uncertainty (or, as Moe from the television
cartoon ‘The Simpsons’ defines it, postmodernism is ‘Weird for the sake of weird’). Yet
others, like Paul Virilio, have turned their attention to digital communication technologies
as providing ways of understanding questions of reality and virtuality. Throughout the
literature, it seems, our universe—from the widest sweep of space and history to the most
secret inner self—is understood as something we grasp through vision and the metaphors
of seeing.

Seeing and Sense

But despite this theoretical emphasis on visuality and/as identity, there is

considerable anxiety about what it means to access the world visually rather than through
literary means. The media routinely run scare stories about declining literacy levels, and
lard these with complaints that, though young people might be very competent in dealing
with video games, movies, television and graphic novels, they don’t read novels, poems and
newspapers, and therefore they (and by extension, society) have lost a precious skill. It’s
not just tabloid editors, educators or frustrated parents who sense that society is becoming
increasingly visual; many theorists have weighed into this argument too. Nicholas Mirzoeff,
for example, expresses a widely held view when he writes that ‘modern life takes place
onscreen . . . Human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before’
(Mirzoeff 1999: 1).

Of course, this is not in fact saying very much, because Mirzoeff does not point out
precisely what he means by ‘visualising’ or ‘visualised’ experience, and how it might be
different from the visualising and visual experiences of people in other times and cultures.
After all, human beings have always lived in a world that is packed with visual objects and
phenomena, and have always looked at and made sense of the things about them. The early
cave paintings are testament to the importance, from the beginnings of (textual) human
history, of seeing and reflecting on what we see. Mirzoeff does argue, though, that the
material we now view is far more complex than the sorts of objects and phenomena that
characterised the visual domain of earlier centuries. Common sense and basic observation
would suggest that this is a reasonable argument, and a number of writers agree with
Mirzoeff. Donald Hoffman, for instance, points to the complexity of material incorporated in
an MTV show, any video game or visual reality experiences (Hoffman 1998: xii). Even a
television advertisement may include a startling combination of shapes and colours, rapid
movements and jumps from scene to scene (and of focus within scenes), morphing and
animation, song and story, and all the multiple associations of sound and movement with
purely visual phenomena which film and digital technologies enable. Urban landscapes, too,
are packed with visual images—building designs, advertising billboards, the many shapes
and colours of vehicles, store windows, mailboxes, cashpoints, traffic lights and so on.

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Visual Saturation

Look at the image presented in Figure 3.1a. It is an ordinary noticeboard located in

an ordinary city street. It makes use of no digital technology, has no cunning printing
devices, sound or movement, and makes no specialised use of linear perspective. Hence we
could say it is a less complex text than, say, a video game. But the multiple shapes, textures
and sizes of the papers attached to the board, the complex layering of individual parts, the
range of fonts, styles and layout—and of course the various colours not reproduced here—
all render it a text that is not easily accessed. The process of reading it is terribly complex
too, because it is loaded with distractions. Where do you begin to read this text: at the top
left? At the centre? At the ‘noisiest’ or the largest sheet? And how do you read it sensibly
when you are being bombarded by a baffling array of distractions—the sounds and
movements of people passing by; cars and buses on the road just behind you; the click of
the traffic lights signalling pedestrians to cross the road; the hiss of automatic doors
opening and closing; the texture, shape and colour of the wall and pavement that frame the
noticeboard. The clamour of colour and sound that interfere with the reading of the
simplest visual text, and the range of signs within any text, mean that there seems no end to
the variety and complexity of the visual matter before our eyes.

But the number of signs we see (and process) in any given day, the volume of
individual signs in a text, the array of colours, the degree of movement and even the degree
of distraction involved in its reading do not necessarily constitute the level of its visual
complexity. The art historian James Elkins argues that we are in fact less visually complex
now than in earlier periods. Genuine complexity, he writes, emerges at the Renaissance
(because of the many new visual technologies and systems of perception developed then)
and ends at the late nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he
suggests, Western principles of thought and perception had moved away from visual to
written forms, producing what he calls ‘generations of speed-readers who can only read
simple [visual] sentences’ (Elkins 2002: 97). Certainly digital communication
technologies—some video games, MTV, web browsers—encourage a fleeting, flickering
glance rather than the concentrated gaze associated with art. And even art receives less
and less attention; Jeannette Winterson in Art Objects (1995: 8) suggests that her readers
try spending an hour looking at a single work in an art gallery and promises great return on
this investment, but curators of art museums have told me that the viewing standard is
more like fifteen seconds per work. What this suggests is that the apparent complexity of
contemporary visual texts is not substantiated by how people use the texts, because the
design of texts made and disseminated through digital communication technologies lends
them to the easy reading—or ‘looking’—of habituation.

Images as Signs

The notion that, despite all the intuitive evidence, we are no longer as visually
complex as people in earlier periods is developed by the US historian Martin Jay (1993,
1995). His central argument is that we are living in a deeply nonvisual period, not because
there are now fewer visual texts or because the texts are simpler in design, but because we
make sense of the world by using non-visual analytic devices. Jay’s point is supported by
fairly recent philosophical writings: the nineteenthcentury philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, for example, wrote of his own visual scepticism: ‘I do not myself believe that
anyone has looked into the world with an equally profound degree of suspicion.’
(Nietzsche, 1986: preface). The early twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger,
deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s work, was likewise sceptical about the extent to which we

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can rely on visual skills, and famously opposed to the centrality of the seeing subject in
Western thought. He argued that aural perception was more reliable than visual (Jay 1993:
268).

Twentieth-century scholarship continued in this strain, because it was marked by

what is called the ‘linguistic turn’—a move within the Humanities to focus almost
exclusively on literary texts, and to use the analytical devices associated with literary texts
to make sense of society, visual images, individual psychology and so on. All social
practices, in other words, were understood as meaning-making practices, or semiotic
events (Evans and Hall 1999: 2). Under this analytical principle, visual texts are considered
to communicate according to linguistic rather than iconographical rules, and scholars who
subscribe to this view argue that we can approach them just as we might approach a novel
or other written text.

Semiotics is certainly an effective tool for analysis because, as we indicated in the

introduction, it deals with signs—anything which stands for something—and, in general,
even obscure visual images can easily be imbued with some meaning. Look at the image in
Figure 3.2, for instance. A rough survey (of friends and colleagues) brought up a range of
interpretations: it was a photo of rotten eggs, and hence communicated the idea of decay; it
was a planetary image, and hence conveyed the idea of unthinkable vastness; it was of the
bubbling volcanic mud pools at Rotorua, New Zealand, and hence a representation of the
exotic; or it was a piece of abstract art, and hence was all about the inarticulable. Although
they couldn’t be certain what it actually represented, everyone was confident that it meant
something—that it was a sign, and not just patterns on the page.

Images and Meaning

The semiotic principle of analysing signs is attractive because it makes good sense
in terms of how people approach texts, and it has been thoroughly tested over a
considerable period of time. Though it is usually associated with the French linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure and his Course in General Linguistics (1907), the idea of language as
a series of signs is found as early as Aristotle, who defined the human voice as semantikos
psophos, ‘significant sound’, or sounds that make meanings (cited in Agamben 1993: 125).

But semiotics is about more than just meaning. Its basic principle is that language is
not simply a naming device, but rather a differentiated symbolic system. Each word (or
sign) applied to an object or idea can be understood and identified because it is
distinguishable from every other word (or sign) that might have been used (Mitchell 1986:
67–8). It would be unthinkable to exist in a world where a hammer could also, and
simultaneously, be called a toothbrush. And because of familiarity, the thing we call
‘hammer’ comes to take on what appears to be a quality of ‘hammerness’, and may be
treated as though there is something inevitable about its identity and its name— something
that seems to be entirely natural.

However, this principle of difference, and hence the technique of (linguistic)

semiotics, can’t easily be applied directly to visual culture. Look at the photograph of
Trafalgar Square in London in Figure 3.3 to make sense of this. The signs in this photograph
don’t take on meanings because of difference, in the strict (semiotic) sense. We don’t
identify the images of buildings as buildings because they are not people or pigeons; rather,
we identify them as buildings in relation to the people and pigeons. We see the buildings,
the people, the pigeons and even the paving as a totality that makes up the image of an
urban space, and thus the whole works together to construct the image we see. We can say,

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then, that visual signs work analogically, producing a story that we identify not in terms of
difference—the digital on–off/same–difference of the linguistic model—but through the
combination of internal elements, and because of intertextual literacies that confirm for us,
on the basis of experience, what they mean.

The linguistic model also fails as a technique for reading the visual because, as
Roland Barthes points out (1977), images both do and don’t have a relationship to
linguistic texts; imagery may be a language, but it doesn’t work like linguistic language, or
possess the sense of grammatical organisation and structure (in terms of verbs, subjects,
connectors and so on) that we expect from words. Images don’t have a tense—for instance,
if we look again at the photograph of Trafalgar Square in Figure 3.3 we might say ‘that’s
Trafalgar Square’, or we might—with equal confidence—say ‘that was the Square in 2000’.
Past and present coexist in a still image. As James Elkins argues, pictures (visual images)
are not like language because they are not made of semiotic marks, or signs that relate to
each other on the basis of a structured relation of difference. And so, he writes: ‘Pictures
are difficult objects: they resist interpretation because they resist words’ (Elkins n.d.).

The Pictorial Turn

So, despite the apparent convenience of the semiotic/linguistic approach for the
analysis of visual texts, most theorists—even those who read visual texts in terms of
semiotic principles—consider that they are substantially different from linguistic texts.
How, then, can we make sense of images as communication? We could take up what is
called the ‘pictorial turn’. The logic here is the need to understand pictures as things in
themselves rather than simply matter that must be reduced to words. British cultural
theorist Stuart Hall describes this approach as meaning ‘realized in use. Their realization
requires, at the other end of the meaning chain, the cultural practices of looking and
interpretation, the subjective capacities of the viewer to make images signify’ (Hall 1999:
310).

This sounds very much like the linguistic approach—that their meanings are
realised because they are translated into language— but Hall’s point is that the image
works not just discursively, or linguistically, but at the level of the subconscious; it is as
concerned with feelings as with sentences and stories, and involves our whole being, not
just our abstract intellectual identity. In the previous chapter we described the physiology
of seeing, and this is involved here, because seeing/reading the visual is, as the
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, a very physical activity (MerleauPonty
1962: 407). Even at the most basic level of understanding, we usually have to move our
bodies to see a visual text: we walk around a sculpture or through a park; we move closer
to and then further away from a painting or building. So visual culture incorporates texts,
the reading of which involves the body and the emotions, and which therefore are a sensate
rather than a purely intellectual means of communication.

The pictorial turn is, obviously, an analytical approach that is semiotic at some
levels: it involves identifying signs, and analysing how they come together to make up a
text within its contexts. But it is not simply semiotic analysis in Saussure’s sense of it being
a ‘science of signs’ because this approach to visual culture demands that the analyst take
into account considerably more than the arrangement of signs. Using this approach means
accounting for cultural and personal acts of looking and interpreting, with all the
subjective, emotional and even unconscious responses each of us brings to this work.
Analysing visual culture under this perspective is thus not simply an intellectual or abstract

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task, but one that involves the physical aspects of the material world, and the material
being of the analyst: ‘seeing as being’.

This approach to the work of the analyst isn’t confined to those of us who analyse
visual texts; the logic of the pictorial turn is central to any number of highly intellectual and
scientific pursuits. Michael Polanyi writes that research scientists are able to practise their
‘art’ because their whole body—using ‘the trained delicacy of eye, ear and touch’—is put to
work to test scientific knowledge against observed events (Polanyi and Prosch 1975: 31).
Doctors and scientists rely on their eyes (and ears, and senses of smell and touch) at least
as much as on conscious reason. So visual culture, as Mirzoeff writes, ‘is not simply the
medium of communication and mass culture. It offers a sensual immediacy that cannot be
rivaled by print media: the very element that makes visual imagery of all kinds distinct
from texts’ (1998: 9).

Communicating and Cultural Fields

Whether we remain committed to the linguistic turn, or take up the analytical

attitude associated with the pictorial turn, we are acknowledging that visual texts are not
just wallpaper, but are always the stuff of communication. However, they do not
communicate objectively or in a vacuum, and any instance of visual (or linguistic)
communication is invested in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘cultural field’ in which the
communication is made, and in which it is analysed. To consider the aspect of cultural field,
we must take into account the socio-cultural status of the fields, groups and individuals
producing visual texts, and the ways in which different fields, different individuals within
fields and different ways of negotiating the fields affect the degree to which the meanings
made are seen to be authoritative, or ‘true’. Mark Poster develops this issue, arguing that
we do not see simply ‘what is there’, but that what he terms ‘different visual regimes’
(Poster 2002: 68)—or different economies of looking and seeing—obtain at different
historical moments and in different contexts.
Let’s consider this by looking at the reproduction of a drawing titled ‘The Straight
Parts of Your Body’ (see Figure 3.4). If we circulated this text across various fields and
contexts, the response we would most likely receive was that it is ‘sweet’ or ‘quaint’—in
other words, that it is naïve, childish and not in any way representative of the real world.
The reasons for this are obvious. Firstly, it looks like a child’s drawing, and children are
usually understood, within Western culture, as having at best a tenuous relation to reality.
Children aren’t educated, and lack access to the kinds of knowledge (say, science or art)
normally understood to have a special status when it comes to accessing or reproducing
the real. This is mirrored in the terms used by the child-artist to categorise the various
parts of the drawing: ‘straight parts’, ‘finger’, ‘toe’. They belong to an everyday discourse,
rather than a scientific or an aesthetic one. Secondly, the very irregular drafting—the use of
circles to represent muscles; the size of the thumbs in relation to the hand—disqualifies it
as emanating from the field of science because it doesn’t truthfully represent either a
human body or its ‘straight parts’.
The binary adult/child is one of many distinctions that help to determine whether
visual texts have any authority to represent reality (adults’ may, children’s don’t). But, as
we pointed out above, the extent to which texts can communicate the ‘real world’ is partly
determined by the field from which they—or the people evaluating them— emerge. If we
asked a group of children in a preschool about the drawing, for instance, they might accept
it as realistic. And there are fields where scientific representations are given the status
normally reserved—outside the playground, at least—for a child’s drawing. We were once

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involved in a project with academic staff from a university engineering faculty. Staff from
the communication studies department explained the project and the rationale behind it a
number of times without getting their message across to the Professor of Engineering, who
didn’t seem capable of grasping what to us were straightforward concepts. Eventually the
professor picked up a whiteboard marker and started drawing diagrams, while being
corrected and advised by the communication staff. He drew a series of circles, each with a
label, with lines and arrows indicating the relation between each component. In short, he
produced a predominantly visual description to sum up, for himself, what the project was
about, and what was required to be done, by whom, when and where. The professor
explained that he and his staff nearly always drew up these kinds ofdiagrams whenever
they needed to explain, understand or communicate anything of a complex nature. Later
some of the communication staff characterised what had happened as an example of how
engineers ‘can’t think’, but what it actually evinced was the status of the visual within
different fields—or what Mark Poster calls ‘different visual regimes’. Within engineering,
communicating by means of the visual is perfectly legitimate, while the communication
staff saw it as childish, or socially incompetent.

Visuality and Reality

The visual regime that is relevant at a particular moment will determine the extent
to which something will make meanings, and the extent to which those meanings will be
taken seriously in society. But the actual truth value of the meanings is never fully reliable.
The general visual regime which has dominated in the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries has been one marked by technological sophistication, which means that images
may well be less ‘truthful’ or reliable than in earlier periods (regimes) because they can
now be altered quite seamlessly, and visual hoaxes are easily perpetrated.
A very famous hoax is the case of the Cottlingley ‘fairies’, where two children
produced (trick) photographs of fairies, and apparently fooled many adults who we might
think should have known better. This story sparked a number of novels and films, including
two movies produced in 1997: Charles Sturridge’s Fairy Tale: A True Story and Nick
Willing’s Photographing Fairies (also titled Apparition). This hoax took place nearly a
century ago, when viewers were perhaps less alert to trick photography, but even now,
when our culture is so thoroughly saturated with digitally altered images, we seem no
more critical or sceptical about visual texts. The airbrushed photographs of celebrities
which keep them young, slender and beautiful across the decades; the magic of digital
remastering which means dead movie stars like Humphrey Bogart can appear in
contemporary advertisements; the hologram of an apple in the Vancouver Science
Museum; the transformation of a pool of metal into a muscled man in the film Terminator
2: all these are familiar images, and we know something of the technology that produces
them. Yet we will still duck as an arrow flies out of a 3-D screen towards us, or gasp at the
sight of an alien space ship hanging over a cityscape. They are obvious illusions yet, despite
the many evidences of visual hoaxes, tricks and misrepresentations, and despite the fact
that we know what we see is not necessarily what we get, we still tend to believe what we
see.
This belief is based in part on common sense and familiarity. If we look again at the
photograph of Trafalgar Square in Figure 3.3, for example, we can be reassured that we
know what is going on, that the camera has reproduced only ‘what was there’. The
familiarity of the scene, and the everyday quality of the actions and objects and persons
represented there, confirm the authority of the eye to see what is really there, and thus
confirm our sense of the order of the world. But we don’t have to resort to visual hoaxes to
undermine this confidence—almost any ‘art’ photograph is likely to do so, and to call into

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question this certainty about what the world looks like. The photograph ‘Landscape’
reproduced in Figure 3.2 does precisely this. Here, as is the case with the Trafalgar Square
photograph, the lens has seen something and reproduced it faithfully; however, because a
technological device sees in a different way from the human eye, what it reproduces
doesn’t necessarily make sense. This is in fact a very close-up photograph of the bowl of a
hookah (a water-cooled smoking pipe), but the everyday eye cannot easily get this close to
the object, or frame it in such a way. Because of this, it looks unfamiliar to us, and less like a
household object than like a watery scene—a murky pond, perhaps, or a bubbling mud
pool. The shape of the whole object, the framing of its surroundings and the context of
other signs in which it is found and ‘read’ are missing in this perspective and cannot be
recalled. What this suggests is that the eye in fact has little authority, and familiar ways of
seeing cannot be relied upon to deliver up to us the truth of what we see, or the likeness of
what we see to an established reality.
Of course, not every visual image is designed—or even expected— to be involved
with the retrieval of the real, and what is meant by reality changes across time, culture and
contexts. Religious institutions and fields, for instance, usually insist upon the
transcendental nature of reality—the everyday phenomenal world is considered either a
stage on a journey to a more profound reality (say, heaven) or simply an illusion, a kind of
false consciousness that has to be overcome in order to achieve enlightenment. Science, on
the other hand, tends to understand what is real as that which can be observed,
demonstrated and proven, while the media use terms like ‘reality’ in a rather nebulous
manner, equating reality with what is happening in the ‘real world’, with what ‘everyone
thinks’ or with the ‘voice of the people’.
When it comes to visual culture, the term ‘reality’ is usually a shorthand way of
saying that some representation is ‘true to life’. What is meant by ‘true to life’ itself depends
itself on culture and context; it might be possible to argue that both fourteenth-century BCE
Egyptian art and paintings by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (see
www.cacr.caltech.edu/rroy/vermeer/thumb.html) or American artist Norman Rockwell
(see www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/ rockwell_norman.html) are ‘realistic’, but the works
hardly resemble one another. They do, though, resemble something, and in this we can
identify an idea about reality and visual culture that has been central to theories of
visuality and culture across Western history. Its basis is the ancient Greek notion of
mimesis, or the imitation (the reproduction) of reality, which in effect posits that the
objects we see are only imitations of an ideal form. This does not mean that the objects we
see are just dreams, or reflections of the perfection found in the transcendent world.
Everyday objects do, of course, have material integrity, but their role is to recall to us the
ethical ideal of which they are the mimesis (or imitation), and to relay that ideal into the
everyday world. In the twentieth-century example of the ‘fairy photographs’ hoax, the point
was to trick people into seeing something that wasn’t there, but under the principle of
mimesis the point is not to trick the eye into thinking it sees reality, but to persuade
viewers that there are ideals to which we can aspire (Melville and Readings 1995: 8). A
beautifully crafted bowl, for instance, might remind us of the ideals of balance and
harmony, and persuade us that this is a good—or the best—way to be.
Western visual culture comes out of this ancient Greek tradition, with its emphasis
on Form, and also out of the Christian tradition with its emphasis on the centrality of faith:
‘the evidence of things not seen’. Consequently, it is concerned to reflect (somewhat)
faithfully the world as being made up of signs of a greater truth—the heavenly realm. This
was especially evident in visual works and in visual interpretation during the medieval and
Renaissance periods because, in each period, visual culture—both natural and of human
production— was considered to be there to reflect, or tell, something about God. The

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historian Johan Huizinga wrote: ‘The Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be
absurd . . . if by their essence they did not reach into a world beyond them’ (cited in Eco
1986a: 52), and Michel Foucault refers to the Renaissance as the ‘age of resemblances’
because everything was assumed to resemble (to echo or imitate) something else.
What this picks up on is the mimetic idea that objects point to a transcendent world.
In the Christian era, the important issue was how to decipher visual objects—and the
everyday world—in terms of God’s code. Everything was there not just to be looked at, not
just for its beauty or pleasure, and not just for its utility or everyday function, but as a
reflection of some aspect of God and God’s story— in fact, as semiotician Umberto Eco
writes: ‘The Medievals inhabited a world filled with references, reminders and overtones of
Divinity, manifestations of God in things’ (Eco 1986a: 53). White was not just a tone, but a
symbol of light and goodness, as black was a symbol of evil. Unicorns, pelicans, lambs, fish,
doves, rams and a number of other things had not only their literal meaning, but also
symbolised Christ in the right context. Everything one could look at had its obvious
meaning and function (a candle is a means of illumination) but also had its allegorical
meaning and function (a burning candle could symbolise eternity or divine salvation; a
guttering candle could remind us of the transitory nature of life).

Reading the Real

The medievals were not alone in their tendency to read visual objects as having
meanings, or seeing in them something more than their obvious or functional identity.
Aristotle had prefigured something of this, writing in his Poetics (350 BCE) that:

the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find
themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you
happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as
such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.

Let’s put these ideas to work now by ‘reading’ the photograph shown in Figure 3.7.
This is a very familiar image in our culture and provides many examples of what Aristotle
called ‘learning’, ‘inferring’ and ‘identifying’; it also has a kind of mimetic role, reflecting
something of an ideal, and it can be read as a kind of allegory.
How can we bring these ideas together? Firstly, a wedding photograph is a point of
enjoyment, as Aristotle would term it, because it provides pleasure for those involved and
their friends and relations: the pleasure of ‘Ah, that is he (or she)’ because it memorialises
the couple and the day. For us, who ‘happen not to have seen the original’ (since this is a
photograph found in a second-hand shop), it also offers a pleasure: observing the clothes,
the bodily arrangement within the party, the looks on their faces—even the pleasure of
guessing who is related to whom and in what context. It therefore produces a satisfying
story.
It is certainly a realist image, because it represents an actual historical moment and
(we assume, based on what we know of the genre) the people reflected in it would easily be
recognised by those who know them—it actually looks like the original that is the couple,
their family and the moment of their wedding. But it is also unreal, or hyperreal, because
even highly realistic works—mimetic works—are still not the thing itself, but only
resemble the thing. Besides, few people look in everyday life as they do in their wedding
photograph; the image is an ideal representation of them at their best and most polished.
The combination of real and not-real shows how the photograph works mimetically, or
rhetorically, by drawing attention away from the actual humdrum, everyday identity of the
people shown there, and instead reflecting an ideal—marriage, fidelity and love.

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 Aristotle insisted that the pleasure of realist works is in ‘learning’, ‘inferring’ and
‘identifying’, and we can interpret the work, following Erwin Panofsky’s model, by
deciphering it across three interpretative strata: its material structure; the factual
meanings of the text and its signs; and specifics of its context. In the case of this wedding
photograph, the first stratum is easily deciphered: we can perceive an arrangement of lines
and light in differently shaded and shaped blocks, and in particular configurations and
spatial orientations. The second stratum is simply a reading of the conventional subject
matter, in terms of recognising the pure forms as particular objects with a social meaning
(Panofsky 1955: 54). In this instance, we can identify the bride and her bridesmaids, the
groom and his groomsmen, the drapes, the carpet and so on. We can also read the motifs—
flowers, lace, bodily postures—and identify in them something of the genres and narratives
they convey. This is also a relatively simple process of deciphering, because it doesn’t
require any literacies beyond everyday knowledge. We can easily define the blobs and lines
as people, furniture and flowers because we are familiar with people, furniture and
flowers; and we can define the motifs and gestures because weddings and wedding
photographs are very familiar genres in Western culture and convey a very familiar story—
being in love, making a commitment, gathering with friends and family, wearing your best
clothes, and so on.
The first two strata, then, are interpreted through the things we already know.
Neither requires any literacy beyond the everyday knowledge that comes from the viewer’s
own history (habitus). But this does not complete the interpretation of a visual image,
either from Aristotle’s point of view (that we must learn), from the allegorical Christian
view (that we must decipher the divine code in all things), or from a contemporary cultural
perspective which insists that what we see is not necessarily what we get, and therefore we
need to analyse, and not just identify, what we see. Panofsky writes: ‘To understand this . . .
I must not only be familiar with the practical world of objects and events, but also with the
more-than-practical world of customs and cultural traditions peculiar to a certain
civilization’ (1955: 52). He goes on to explain it more particularly as an interpretative
attitude determined ‘by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic
attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—qualified by
one personality and condensed into one work’ (Panofsky 1955: 55). The nineteenth-
century French poet Baudelaire had already articulated this, in writing about the mimetic
function of fashion plates from the 1790s:

What I am glad to find in all or nearly all of them, is the moral attitude and the
aesthetic value of the time. The idea of beauty that man creates for himself affects
his whole attire, ruffles or stiffens his coat, gives curves or straight lines to his
gestures and even, in process of time, visibly penetrates the very features of his face.
Man comes in the end to look like his ideal image of himself. (1972: 391)

But unless Baudelaire had a knowledge of the ethos and aesthetics of the 1790s, he could
have read these fashion plates only as a quaint reference from the past.
To apply this notion to our wedding photograph, we might, for instance, identify the
apparent age gap between bride and groom, the formality of the arrangement of the whole
party, and what appears to be the discomfort expressed by the groomsmen. Then we could
analyse this further in terms of its socio-historical location (mid-twentieth century) and
make some statement about the gender politics that obtained then (women might be lovely
but remained in many ways the possessions of their husbands) or the class politics
(marked by the apparent discomfort of the young men, particularly compared with other
images we might know of contemporary young professional men). In this way, we can

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move from an interpretation based on familiarity with forms, genres and narratives to the
application of literacies which allow us to understand and critique the reality of what we
are shown, and what it is communicating.

The Reality Function

Photographs and other communication technologies may give us very recognisable
images but, as we have argued, they are no more reliable at retrieving reality than any
other medium. Besides, what we count as real or realist depends on the context in which
we are looking, and what we expect from it. The British cartoonist Norman Thelwell, for
instance, is famous for his many drawings of ponies: no one could ever see a pony that
looked like one of Thelwell’s drawings, but at the same time his drawings are immediately
and delightfully recognisable as ponies. They have a particular ‘reality function’, or ‘truth-
to-reality’, that is based on the field (cartooning), the context (entertaining drawings), the
narratives (children and their ponies) and the ideological framework (the endless
competition of social life).
So truth-to-reality, transparent communication, tradition or utility are not the only
ways to understand visual representation. For well over a century now, many practitioners
have deliberately rejected the idea that they are producing mimetic works, or realistic
images of the world out there. Think of advertisers with their jingles, dancing chickens and
whiter-than-white laundry; think of school children learning to manipulate photographs so
they no longer represent their image; think too of film-makers, and their rejection of the
early twentieth-century conventions of plot and narrative. A movie like Three Kings, for
instance, unabashedly shows the impossible in the form of the ‘bullet cam’ shot where,
when George Clooney, who plays Special Forces Captain Archie Gates, is explaining to his
subordinates why one should endeavour not to be shot, the camera follows an imaginary
bullet through the air and into the abdomen of one of his fellow soldiers, and then back out
again. Like Impressionist paintings which weren’t so much concerned with the thing
represented as with the form of representation—how light was rendered, how to explore
feelings in paint—or Cubist works, which attempted to show all dimensions of an object at
one moment, contemporary forms of visual representation take issue with the notion that
there is just one right way of seeing and being.
Many, in fact, have gone even further away from resemblance, and from ways of
alluding to the ‘real’ world. Think of the abstraction of American minimalism in the middle
of the twentieth century when a work might be only white paint on a white canvas—Robert
Rauschenberg’s ‘White Painting’ series (1951), for instance—and in fact constitute a refusal
to represent the world at all. From a different approach, but with a similar attitude, much
contemporary art is almost purely self-referential (referring only to the art world). One
example is the work of installation artist Ben Vautier who produced a work titled ‘J’ai pas
peur de Marcel’ (‘I’m not afraid of Marcel’, 1994–96). It is a large knife grinder, exhibited
with the title and a panel incorporating a quote from Marcel Duchamp. The work has
virtually no ‘artistic’ signs apart from the fact that it is produced by a known artist, is
exhibited in a recognised art museum, and of course refers to Marcel Duchamp’s famous
installation of a urinal, ‘Fountain’ (1917). Whether artists are refusing to represent
reality— as in the case of abstract minimalism—or representing something that is reality
only to a tiny audience—as with Vautier’s work—what we have is, like Rene Magritte’s
famous ‘This is Not a Pipe’ (www.uwrf.edu/history/prints/magritte-pipe.html), artists
refusing to affirm or communicate anything at all.
Given this context, and the fact that we can’t rely on the evidence or the authority of
our eyes to tell us the truth of what we are seeing, it can be argued that what reality means
in visual culture is simply a means of communication (‘it’s real, or like reality, because it’s

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telling us something true’). Whether a visual image really looks like the original or not, it
has a sort of ritual function in telling its viewers something about itself, and about society
in relation to itself. Look, for example, at the photograph in Figure 3.8a, an arrangement of
kiln goddesses modelled on the very famous statue of the Venus of Willendorf (Figure
3.8b), believed to be 25,000 years old.
That Venus, with her vast breasts and belly, and her heavy thighs, does not in any
respect call up contemporary ideals of female beauty. The statue does, however represent
the notion of fertility, and for contemporary audiences it also summons up the powerful
ideas of magic and religion. In the arrangement shown here, the potter is not simply
reiterating the ideas communicated by the ancient craftspeople. (After all, we can’t know
for certain what they were communicating in their work—the past, as novelist L.P. Hartley
pointed out, is a foreign country: ‘they do things differently there’.) But, because she is
making such a deliberate reference to the early forms, it is worth paying attention to what
is being communicated. At the basic level, we could argue, she is simply following a
common practice in her field: potters often make small objects out of scraps of clay to tuck
in with a firing. But many women potters, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, deliberately
made them in the form of those ancient goddesses, in response firstly to their own culture
(reflecting secondwave feminism and a particular perspective on women’s power) and
then to an idea of history, or a matriarchal prehistory. As copies of an ancient visual text,
the kiln goddesses privilege fecundity and matriarchy; as late twentieth-century texts, they
interrogate contemporary ideals of female beauty and the body fascism of fashion; and as
objects associated with the craft of pottery, they respond to internal craft traditions, and
remind practitioners of the ancient magic of the kiln.
The potter in this example is communicating something that is quite easily
interpreted, because we have shared understandings of the culture and context in which
she was making the objects. But even in cultures where no written records have been left to
explain the significance of particular cultural forms, we can make educated guesses about
what is being communicated. Most art historians seem to agree with John Berger that
‘Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent’
(1972: 10), which suggests that a claim is being made to an idea of truth-toreality as a
communicative gesture. Certainly we can recognise the shapes of animals, the hunt, people,
spirits and gods in visual works from prehistory, and whether these were made as forms of
art (as we now understand the term) or record-keeping or religious acts, they do present
an image of something not present. And whatever they might or might not indicate about
what those hunter–gatherer communities understood by reality, we can see them as
functional works, produced to communicate something of an event, a tradition or a belief
system.
Something similar can be identified in the works of contemporary Australian
Aboriginal artists who frequently—particularly in the case of rural/tribal mark-makers—
produce their works not just, and not even primarily, as aesthetic objects, but for
communication and record-keeping, for traditional functions and to maintain their
relationship with their ‘country’ (land). The storyboards and bark paintings of the Papunya
or Yirrkala practitioners, for instance, describe cultural practices such as clan groupings,
and they both map and explain the relation of the people to the land. The artist Galarrwuy
Yunupingu writes:

When we paint—whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or canvas for

the market—we are not just painting for fun or profit. We are painting, as we have
always done, to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights
and responsibilities we have to it. We paint to show the rest of the world that we

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 own this country and that the land owns us. Our painting is a political act.
(Yunupingu 1997: 65)

No universal statements can be made about any mark-making because it is always

socially, culturally and historically contingent. But the way in which various visual texts
depict the thing ‘not present’ does tell us something about the cultural values, ideals of
beauty and order, and sense of reality pertinent to that culture.

Conclusion
In this chapter we have outlined the relationship, in visual culture, between
representations of reality and means of communication. But, as Stuart Hall writes:

The symbolic power of the image to signify is in no sense restricted to the conscious
level and cannot always easily be expressed in words. In fact, this may be one of the
ways in which the so-called power of the image differs from that of the linguistic
sign. What is often said about the ‘power of the image’ is indeed that its impact is
immediate and powerful even when its precise meaning remains, as it were, vague,
suspended—numinous. (Hall 1999: 311)

In the next chapter we will take up the question of how visual narratives may be
structured, and discuss the ways in which stories can be told in this ‘suspended’ and
‘numinous’ medium, and the extent to which this medium may communicate more than
unconscious or subconscious impressions.

Synthesizing Your Knowledge

Note: Your activity will be sent by the instructor.

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 UNIT 5
VISUAL LITERACY: READING PICTURES

Overview

Visual literacy allows individual learners to interpret art and visual media as they
come into contact with them. In this unit visual literacy, otherwise known as visual skill will
be discussed. With the aim of helping students read pictures in mastering verbal skills.

Learning Objectives
At the end of the unit, I am able to:
1. present the theme and character of the different periods of Visual Art
development in the Philippines and Southeast Asia; and,
2. explain special nature of Visual Art in the different countries Southeast Asia.

Expanding Your Knowledge

Understanding How Photographs Communicate

Here are a few of the techniques and strategies by which a photo conveys meaning:

 Angle: The vantage point or direction from which the artist photographs the
subject.
 Framing: By deciding where the edges of the image will be, the photograph
determines what you will (and will not) see—whether the subject will fill the frame
and appear “close up” or will be seen at a distance as part of a larger context.
 Light: Light is one of the most powerful tools of the photographer. The manipulation
of light and dark and the sharpness of contrast between light and dark contribute to
the mood a photograph conveys.
 Focus: The clarity or blurriness of the image. The range between the nearest and
farthest things that appear in clear focus defines the photograph’s depth of field.
 Composition: What is in the foreground? Are the elements arranged in any
particular pattern? Do you see any geometric shapes? Are the lines of the
photograph straight or curving, thick or thin? Do any visual elements repeat? Is the
visual weight of the photograph balanced: on each side? top to bottom? diagonally?
(Adapted from Susan Schekel, personal communication, Stony Brook University)

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Using Photographs in the Classroom

For many years, I have been a fan of the news photo awards given annually by
Editor & Publisher magazine. Each year, newspapers and magazines are recognized for
excellence in photography. Categories include hard news, soft news (feature), sports, and
more. You can search previous years’ winners at www.editorandpublisher.com.

When working with groups of students, I recommend printing out and distributing a
different photo to each group. Because they will not likely have had any prior experience
analyzing photos, they will need some guidance.

Framing

Imagine holding a camera and looking through its viewfinder. You might move the
camera, or yourself, in order to improve the composition of the picture inside your
viewfinder, and thus your final picture. You are deciding what to include and what to leave
out. This is called framing. When many of us look at a photograph, we usually don’t ask the
critical-thinking question: What is outside the frame? But we should.

Visual Literacy Inquiry

Graphic designer Erin Riesland (2005) suggests that students who are learning to
incorporate visual literacy into their thinking consider the following questions:

– What am I looking at?

– What does this image mean to me?
– What is the relationship between the image and the displayed text message?
– How is this message effective? (Riesland, 2005, para. 10)

Manipulation of Images

Pick up a magazine aimed at women and, even though it’s hard to tell, most likely
the cover has been retouched or digitally altered. The use of software programs to change
photographic images has become so commonplace that many of us don’t realize or
recognize it.

Is Seeing Believing?

In 2002, I received an email with the subject line “National Geographic 2002 Photo
of the Year.” Upon opening the email, I was presented with a color photo of what appeared
to be a shark coming out of the water about to attack a man coming down the ladder of a
helicopter hovering over the water. Wow, I thought, this is impressive, and I forwarded the
email to friends.

When I first received the email, I admit, my critical

faculties were dropped. It was certainly possible, I
reasoned, that National Geographic, with photographers
literally all over the world, captured this photo of a man
about to be attacked by a shark.

Unfortunately, this “photo” does not represent

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what really happened: it is a digital manipulation. Shortly after the viral email made the
rounds, the National Geographic website debunked the doctored image (Danielson &
Braun, 2005). In explaining the hoax photo, they describe the original two images that were
morphed to create the final image.

Students could use the critical-thinking questions and apply them to this image.
Who created the image? Because it was a viral email, it had no traceable author. All
photographers want credit for their work, so when a photo has no caption or author, we
should be wary. What is the purpose of the image? It is clear that the author/ creator hoped
readers would forward it, without question, which many of us did. Who is the audience for
this message? Anyone who reads email. What techniques were used to create it? The
author/creator located real images online, used some kind of photo-editing software, and
wrote an email that sounded authentic. To check if an email or image is an “urban legend,”
use the Snopes.com website (www.snopes. com), which researches and reports whether a
message is true or false. The Internet shark attack hoax is debunked at
www.snopes.com/photos/animals/shark.asp.

Visual Literacy and News Content (News Literacy)

Kate Brigham’s thesis, “Decoding Visual News Content” (2002; http://katebrigham.

com/thesis/forMIT/Interface.htm) is a valuable resource designed to educate news
consumers about the design of news graphics on television and layout in news magazines.
The intention of the activities on the site, according to the author, “is to introduce people to
some methods for looking more critically at visual news content.” She uses the news media
coverage about the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York to explore issues. By clicking
on Television Stills (for example), you can change the background image or colors. Readers
can also explore reasons behind certain image uses, text, visual features, and concepts, as
well as explanations of the medium used and the sources of the images.

Visual Literacy in the Political Arena

The next time you see President Obama’s photo in the news, remember this:
Everything about that image likely will have been carefully thought out ahead of time. Not
many people know that the White House has a Communications Department, composed of
television and advertising experts, whose sole job it is to make the president look his best
in tomorrow’s news.

Yes, a stage will have been built, and a lot of thought goes into what is behind the
chief executive. In other words, framing: what the camera sees. The photographers will all
be told where to stand to get the “best shot,” which is what you will see in the evening
news, the morning newspaper, and the weekly news magazine. Image is more important
than words; our brains will retain the impressions more than what is said, so image control
is paramount. From Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama, the people in office or running for
office have been concerned about their image.

Their aides fret over the question: What do we want the public and the media to
see? Their campaign aides and consultants try to control how the media convey the
politician’s image in the press. “Photo ops” (short for photo opportunities) abound: specific
events and times when news photographers can capture the candidates doing anything,
from kissing babies to eating lunch. All candidates are interested in how they are
represented. Candidates, for example, may wear a coat and tie in order to communicate a

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serious business or formal message. Or they may dress down, as John Edwards did,
wearing blue jeans and no tie for much of his 2008 poverty tour. Or they might wear the
color red, as Hillary Clinton did, perhaps to communicate patriotism. Or they may be seated
aboard a tank, as Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis did, trying to
communicate his strength on America’s defense. President G. W. Bush wanted to send a
message of a strong leader when he appeared on an aircraft carrier to declare “Mission
Accomplished” in Iraq.

Questioning Photographs

How we interpret photographs depends on a number of factors. For example, have

you had any photography training that would help you understand framing, composition,
depth of field, focus, backlighting, and the like? Have you been exposed to any visual
literacy education designed to help you read photographic images? Assuming the answer is
no, then you would not necessarily have the skills needed to read the language of
photographic images. Professional photographers and photojournalists, who have had
training, understand how to use the tools of their trade. They also know how to
communicate a message to the audience using those tools. Today, those tools include the
ability to capture an event, digitally alter an image, and transmit it thousands of miles in a
few minutes. But that wasn’t always the case.

When thinking about the image of the Kennedys (see Figure 3.6) and what it might
represent, we might say that it could be representative of a romantic moment: two people
sharing some quiet time, relaxing and alone. The fog in the distance also lends to the mood.
We might speculate as to the weather, because the Senator has his hands in his pockets; his
wife is wearing a coat. She has taken her shoes off in order to walk in the sand. There
appear to be tire tracks in the sand, indicative of a car or some other vehicle having driven
there.

How did the photographer know they would be on the beach at that time? Did the
Kennedy campaign issue a press release notifying the media that the candidate would be
available for a photo op? What was the campaign hoping this image would communicate to
voters?

The important thing to remember here is that the Kennedys were not alone. There
was a photographer who took this picture; he was situated behind them. His framing of this
shot, or the cropping of it, is such that we are not allowed to see what might be to the left or
right of the Kennedys. We should ask: what is outside the photographer’s viewfinder? What
are we not allowed to see and why?

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 Synthesizing Your Knowledge

Activity 4
Name: ___________________________________________________ Date: ______________________
Course and Section: ____________________________________ Score: _____________________

Photo Analysis Worksheet

Step 1. Observation

A. Study the photograph for two minutes. Form an overall impression of the
photograph and then examine individual items. Next, divide the photo into
quadrants and study each section to see what new details become visible.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

B. Use the chart below to list people, objects, and activities in the photograph.

People Objects Activities

Step 2. Inference

A. Based on what you have observed above, list three things you might infer from
this photograph.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Step 3. Questions

A. What questions does this photograph raise in your mind?

_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

B. Where could you find answers to them?

_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Photo Analysis Worksheet developed by the National Archives

www.archives.gov/research/start/by-format.html#photos

Note: Other activities will be sent by the instructor.

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