My tutor suggested reading Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies: An interpretation to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2001) to look at a method you might use (or two) to articulate the work I am going to study in CTS.
This text does give a useful range of methods that can be used to interpret visual images. Here I am extracting from my more extensive notes, thoughts that are most pertinent me at this stage.
When introducing ways of looking at visual material she clarifies that:
- Vision is what the human eye is physiologically capable of seeing.
- Visuality refers to the way in which vision is constructed- what is seen and how it is culturally constructed.
- Ocular centrism: the apparent centrality of the visual to contemporary Western life.
- Simulacrum: There are different ways of seeing the world and the critical task is to differentiate between the social effects of those different visions (p9 pdf.
Rose suggests 5 aspects of recent literature that engage with visual culture which are useful for thinking about the social effects of images:
- Images should do something, have their own visual effect.
- These effects may affect the way images visualise or make invisible social difference.
- Consider how images they are looked at and the relationship between things and ourselves.
- Visual images are embedded in a wider culture.
- The importance of audience and their response.
Rose proposes that to understand the importance of visual images:
- Take images seriously.
- Think about the social conditions of images.
- Consider your own way of looking at images.
Visual imagery is always constructed in some way and therefore we should always take a critical approach to it. Any approach should think about the agency of the image, the social practices and effects of its viewing, and reactions on the viewing by various audiences including the academic critic.
Rose suggests we should consider three sites of the meaning of images:
- The production
- The image itself
- The sites of the image (audience) and different aspects of these, technological apparatus, compositional, and the social, economic, and political context.
Theoretical debates about how to interpret images, is about which of these sites and modalities is most important for understanding an image. Rose suggests these methodologies:
Compositional interpretation: Colour (hue, saturation, values), spatial organisation, light and expressive content. This is mostly concerned with the image itself in its compositional modality. It does pay some attention to the production of images, especially their technologies.
Disadvantage: It isn’t interested in the social practices of visual images,
Content analysis “counting what you (think you) see”, a quantitative methodology, which developed as a social science research method to be scientific, repeatable and therefore valid. It offers clear methodological guidelines.
Disadvantages:
- It doesn’t use reflexivity of the viewer or researcher.
- The relative significance and context are difficult to address.
- content analysis has no way of dealing with those sites at which the meanings of images are made other than that of the image itself.
Semiology (semiotics) are analytical tools for seeing how images relate to broader systems of meaning. It is the study of signs, which depends on the distinction between the signifier and the signified of the sign, and focuses on the image itself. It is not simply descriptive. Semiological studies focus on the image itself, with attention to audiencing and reflexivity.
Psychoanalysis is a range of theories dealing with human subjectivity, sexuality and the unconscious, and has a vocabulary for the effects of these on audiences.
Disadvantage: Psychoanalysis does not address the social practices of the display and the viewing of visual images.
Discourse analysis 1: The site of the image itself (text, intertextuality and context)
This is a complex theoretical legacy of Foucault that has contributed to methodological practices. Discourse analysis I, uses `discourse’ referring to all forms of talk and texts. It uses the notion of discourse to address the rhetorical organisation and social production of visual, written and spoken materials.
Disadvantage: It doesn’t consider the social practices and institutions through which discourses are expressed.
Discourse analysis II: Site of production (institutions and ways of seeing)
Uses similar methods to discourse 1, but is more about the way discourse is produced by institutions and their practices, rather than to the visual images and verbal texts. It is more concerned with issues of the articulation of discourses through institutional apparatuses and technologies and power. Who, when and why is it produced for?
Disadvantages:
- Less interested in the site of the image itself.
- Not concerned with reflexivity
Rose suggests questions to use when interpreting visual images, these are the ones that most interest me:
The production of an image:
Was it made for someone else?
What technology did it depend on?
What are the social identities of the maker, owner and the subject?
What are the relations between the maker, owner and the subject?
Does the form of the image reconstitute these identities and relations?
The image itself:
How are the components of the image arranged?
Where is the viewers eye drawn to?
What do the different components of the image signify?
What knowledges are being employed or excluded?
Is it a contradictory image?
The audience:
Who was the original audience, the current audience?
How was it displayed originally?
How is it circulated, re displayed, stored?
What is the relationship between the image and its viewers?
Where is the spectator situated?
What reaction does it provoke in viewers?
How has its interpretation been affected by text, circulation, publicity, display?
Is more than one interpretation possible, especially by different audiences?
As Rose states each of these methodologies have limited focuses, and if combining them you should consider theoretical accuracy, but that overall it is important to recognise the effects of both an image’s way of seeing, and your own.
At this stage the method that I am most likely to use is semiology. It offers a way of looking at images carefully, including social differences and the effect of images. However, I do have reservations. Reflexivity, will be important in my work, not only my own, but my viewers and it seems semiology may not allow much for this. In semiology the image causes the audience’s position.
I may also use compositional interpretation, though it “concentrates almost entirely on the compositional modality of the image itself “(Rose,2001 :191), she does recommend that the detailed viewing of an image is essential initially for a critical understanding and that hence this method may be a good method to use before moving onto other methods. I am interested the expressive content of images, which Rose calls the “feel of an image … as `the combined effect of subject matter and visual form’ (Rose,2001:52). She suggests that compositional interpretation may address an image’s possible effects on a spectator (Rose, 2001:52), and that this is useful, provided it doesn’t obscure other factors when analysing the meaning of an image.
Possibly mixing these methodologies for interpreting visual materials might be useful for me.
Reference:
Rose, G. (2001) ‘Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials’ In: PDF At: https://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/2001_Rose_Visual_Methodologies_book.pdf
NIKI SOUTH 