The photos of Haiti on Boston.com shows a country that is suffering unfathomable tragedy. From an outsider's standpoint we see an already impoverished culture struggling to survive and working tirelessly to locate loved ones and help the injured. The photos provided interpellate viewers to feel compassion and pain for the people of Haiti and intent of the photographer is to provide viewers with real images of the disaster in order to inform the audience.
The encoded message in the photographs is a cry to viewers for help. The lack of medical supplies and sterile triage areas is shocking in the photographs where the injured are sitting in pools of blood that is not their own. Recent news articles have been full of stories about how doctors have had little or no pain medication to administer so they were doing procedures on people without. The photo of the young girl receiving care reminded me of these stories since her eyes seem to be so full of pain. The only way to decode these images is through dominant-hegemonic reading since the suffering and pain is so obvious, no one should be reading these images in a negotiated or oppositional reading.
The photo of the young men praying in Connecticut is symbolic of the world's reaction to this tragedy. The empathy that has been shown to the Haitians has been impressive; however, there is still so much work to be done to assist the survivors in moving forward with their lives.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Week One
1. In the PL the authors claim "our lives are increasingly dominated by the visual" (p. 1) since we depend on our electronic devices to make us feel connected to our surrounding culture. Even though we rely on images, we know that they cannot always communicate the whole story so we depend on print to fill in the rest of the information. While images have different meaning to each viewer, print is less open to interpretation since the author has a better opportunity to explain what she means.
2. Culture is defined as "a whole way of life" (p. 3) and classifies people according to their activities and interests. Visual rhetoric is made up of the images that are exchanged within a culture. In order to understand visual rhetoric one must understand that different cultures may perceive the same image in very different ways.
3. Sturken and Cartwright offer three approaches to their audience as ways to understand the text (p.). The first is to use theory when studying images and meanings. The second uses psychology and social patterns to examine responses to visuality. The third approach mentioned encourages us to look across cultures to see how the meanings of different media change.
4. Connotative meaning describes how an image can be interpreted different ways depending on what the image means to each person, according to their cultural makeup and historical knowledge of the image. The denotative meaning of an image is more specific and less open to interpretation since it is a literal meaning of an image.
5. Ideologies are a culture's system of beliefs. Sturken and Cartright argue that by darkening O.J. Simpson's skin tone Time was influencing the public because the same practice was used in the entertainment industry to portray villains, during the nineteenth century.
6. An image is considered to have value if it has social, cultural or historical meaning. Social value refers to the popularity of the work and the image's monetary worth. An image is culturally valuable if the audience is able to relate to the work and feel that the image has a significance in relation to their set of values. When an image captures a historical moment the work is considered valuable to that culture as well.
7. There is no fail proof way for a producer to ensure their message is received as they intended. Some of the variables that prevent this can be how the ads are juxtapositioned against others, or the context in which a viewer receives the image.
8. According to Karl Marx, the people that "own the means of production are also in control of the ideas and viewpoints produced and circulated" (p. 69).
9. Hegemony means that "power is negotiated among all classes of people" rather than being upheld by one class over another (p. 70). For a society to have hegemony there would have to be negotiations regarding meanings, laws and social relationships.
2. Culture is defined as "a whole way of life" (p. 3) and classifies people according to their activities and interests. Visual rhetoric is made up of the images that are exchanged within a culture. In order to understand visual rhetoric one must understand that different cultures may perceive the same image in very different ways.
3. Sturken and Cartwright offer three approaches to their audience as ways to understand the text (p.). The first is to use theory when studying images and meanings. The second uses psychology and social patterns to examine responses to visuality. The third approach mentioned encourages us to look across cultures to see how the meanings of different media change.
4. Connotative meaning describes how an image can be interpreted different ways depending on what the image means to each person, according to their cultural makeup and historical knowledge of the image. The denotative meaning of an image is more specific and less open to interpretation since it is a literal meaning of an image.
5. Ideologies are a culture's system of beliefs. Sturken and Cartright argue that by darkening O.J. Simpson's skin tone Time was influencing the public because the same practice was used in the entertainment industry to portray villains, during the nineteenth century.
6. An image is considered to have value if it has social, cultural or historical meaning. Social value refers to the popularity of the work and the image's monetary worth. An image is culturally valuable if the audience is able to relate to the work and feel that the image has a significance in relation to their set of values. When an image captures a historical moment the work is considered valuable to that culture as well.
7. There is no fail proof way for a producer to ensure their message is received as they intended. Some of the variables that prevent this can be how the ads are juxtapositioned against others, or the context in which a viewer receives the image.
8. According to Karl Marx, the people that "own the means of production are also in control of the ideas and viewpoints produced and circulated" (p. 69).
9. Hegemony means that "power is negotiated among all classes of people" rather than being upheld by one class over another (p. 70). For a society to have hegemony there would have to be negotiations regarding meanings, laws and social relationships.
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