Ch.1: Visual Literacy, Visual Analysis, and Viewers Make Meaning

1. Visual literacy and the perception cycle

• Visual literacy is the ability to read and critically analyze images. It helps you engage with your own and other cultures, avoid being misled by deceptive images, and create impactful images yourself.

• Perception cycle:

  1. Sensing: the unconscious intake of light (a camera with no film).

  2. Selecting: the conscious isolation of parts of a scene, classifying them as familiar, unfamiliar, or meaningful.

  3. Perceiving: making sense of what you selected. It is an intellectual act, and it is needed for memory.

• "The more you know, the more you see." Expertise changes what you notice, as with the baseball fan at a Blue Jays game.

• What makes images memorable: personal relevance, repeated viewing, and ambiguity or enigma (Mona Lisa, The Scream). Tiredness, stress, and distraction work against memory.

• "It's Your Turn" answer: visual analysis belongs to perceiving, because it is the deliberate, intellectual work of making sense of what you've selected.

2. The three steps of visual analysis

Step 1: Formal analysis

Formal qualities don't carry meaning in themselves, but they shape interpretation. Start with the dominant contrast, meaning where your eye goes first and why (colour, size, centrality, leading lines).

Step 2: Content analysis

• Make an inventory of everything depicted.

• Look at people (age, sex, clothing, held objects), location (weather, urban or wilderness, signs of modernity), and symbols (rose means love, halo means holiness).

• Example: The Hay Wain (Constable) is a rural scene from around the 1800s, with a horse and cart, no modern infrastructure, and a possible English setting (cottage, Springer Spaniel).

• This requires no training, only careful looking. Expertise adds more detail.

Step 3: Artists' intentions (asking "why?")

• Why was it made (educate, entertain, sell, evoke feeling)? Why this subject? Why these formal choices (colour, medium, framing, line)?

• This can require research on social, political, and personal context, but you can also speculate from the effects on the viewer.

• Example: Friedrich's small monk, blue palette, and horizontal lines suggest the smallness of humanity before an almighty God.

3. Sturken & Cartwright: Viewers Make Meaning

Core argument

• Meaning does not sit inside the image waiting to be uncovered. It is produced through a social relationship among the image, the producer, the viewer, and the context.

• Images "speak" to specific audiences, and they also construct audiences.

• Producers usually have a preferred meaning. Advertisers research audiences to secure it. But intentions are often unknowable and may not match what viewers take away, so they are rarely a fully useful strategy for analysis.

• Viewers aren't wrong when they read differently. Meaning depends on when, where, and by whom an image is consumed.

• M*A*S*H example: a working-class US teen in 1976 and a Brazilian shopkeeper ten years later read it differently. Neither reading is more accurate. Age, class, gender, region, and historical moment all matter.

• Dominant meanings are those that tend to predominate in a culture, and they emerge from this social interaction.

Encoding and decoding

• Images are encoded with meaning when produced and further encoded by their setting. They are decoded by viewers according to their cultural assumptions and viewing context. The two work in tandem.

Stuart Hall's three reading positions

1. Dominant-hegemonic: the viewer accepts the intended or dominant message unquestioningly (passive).

2. Negotiated: the viewer "haggles" with dominant meanings using their own knowledge, memories, and culture (active). Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is an example: enjoyed, but seen as a sign of crass commercialism.

3. Oppositional: the viewer rejects or disagrees with the meaning, or ignores it, or repurposes the work.

Add intended meaning as the lesson's fourth item: the creator's encoded message.

Aesthetics and taste

• Aesthetics covers ideas of beauty and ugliness. Kant argued beauty was universal, but contemporary thinking treats it as culturally specific ("beauty is in the eye of the beholder").

• Taste is learned through class, education, and cultural institutions (museums, "tasteful" stores). It isn't innate.

• Connoisseurship is the myth of "natural" taste, which masks the fact that taste is learned.

• Bourdieu (1970s France) argued taste is a gatekeeping structure that enforces class boundaries. It is tied to habitus, the web connecting taste in art, food, fashion, and sports to class and profession.

• High versus low culture is a class-based distinction that has been blurred by Pop Art, postmodernism, and kitsch.

Ideology

• Ideology is a system of ideas that societies present as "natural."

• Marx: ideology as false consciousness, with those who own the means of production controlling media content. Many now see this as too top-down and totalizing.

• Althusser: ideology is the "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." It isn't simply false. It is the necessary means through which we make sense of reality, shaped by the unconscious (drawing on psychoanalysis).

  • Interpellation means being "hailed" by ideology, which addresses us and designates the kind of viewer we're meant to be. Example: the AT&T "You will" ad, which addresses a busy, tech-embracing professional.

  • Critique: if we're always already constructed as subjects, there is little room for agency.

• Gramsci: hegemony replaces domination. Power is negotiated among classes, and dominant ideologies are presented as "common sense" and must be constantly reaffirmed. This allows for counter-hegemonic forces.

  • Example: Barbara Kruger's Untitled (1981), an atomic bomb image with the text "Your manias become science," critiques Cold War ideology and Western science.

Appropriation and oppositional practices

• Appropriation: borrowing and changing the meaning of existing images, slogans, or styles. Traditionally it means taking without consent, but it can be a tool of opposition.

  • Gran Fury, Read My Lips: reworks Bush's slogan to counter AIDS and homophobia myths.

  • José Antonio Burciaga, The Last Dinner of Chicano Heroes: reworks da Vinci's Last Supper with Chicano heroes and symbols (Virgin of Guadalupe, Day of the Dead). Warhol also appropriated The Last Supper.

  • Oppositional reading of films: lesbian and gay readings of Garbo, and re-evaluating blaxploitation films.

  • Trans-coding: re-using derogatory terms in empowering ways ("queer," "Black is beautiful").

• Bricolage is "making do" by piecing together culture from what is at hand (Lévi-Strauss, Hebdige). Youth subcultures do this with clothing, as with Doc Martens, punk, and Chicano low-riders.

• Textual poaching (de Certeau) is inhabiting a text "like a rented apartment," as with fan cultures like The X-Files and Star Trek.

  • De Certeau's strategies are institutional power, and tactics are the "hit and run" acts of consumers.

  • "The art of making do" means viewers may not be able to change cultural products but can interpret, reject, or reconfigure them.

• Re-appropriation and counter-bricolage: mainstream industries take up subcultural styles and sell them back (thrift fashion, rap, the marketing of "cool"). Culture is in constant flux.

4. Vocabulary quick-check

• Dominant contrast: where the eye looks first.

• Diptych / triptych: two-part / three-part image.

• Encoding / decoding: embedding meaning in an image / interpreting it.

• Interpellation: being "hailed" as a subject by ideology.

• Hegemony: power negotiated through consent and "common sense."

• Counter-hegemonic: forces that challenge the dominant order.

• Appropriation: borrowing and repurposing existing images or styles.

• Trans-coding: re-using a derogatory term positively.

• Bricolage / counter-bricolage: "making do" / the mainstream re-absorbing it.

• Textual poaching: viewers "inhabiting" and reworking texts.