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November 14, 2005
Anita Seppä and Reijo Kupiainen in Visual data research methods seminar
Anita Seppä, Reijo Kupiainen from Pori school of Visual culture studies
Visual culture studies
Is interdisciplinary, drawing from cultural studies, critical esthetics, linguistics, semiotics, and art history. It has grown from the 1980s onwards, along with the proliferation of images in our society due to the evolving reproduction techniques.
The approach followed in Pori
Is the postmodern, poststructural approach which connects images to critical philosophy and social studies. The centre point is the image, but this approach stresses the "culture" part in visual culture: images always have a cultural bear, they reflect values, relations, beliefs, and are operations of power. They never just show reality, they show a construction of it, and they also recreate reality, bringing new levels to it.
The social effect of images
Is that they bring in ways to see the world. An image has power to point, name, label things to be looked at, and how to look at them. Referring to Maarit's presentation: Who has been producing the Marilyn images all these years? There are looks and counter-looks, as an example, the recent Animalia campaign which got sensored from the streets (although returning soon it seems). This is called intertextual play in visual culture studies.
For long, art theory held that culturally innnocent, pure representations exist in images. It is still a common notion that for example news images are universal, documentary. Now, in research, however, most people say such images do not exist but that images always create power divisions and social differences of race, class, gender, and so on.
Roland Barthes says image needs text to accompany it, because it is a direct imprint of reality (don't ask me, read Barthes :) ). On the contrary, in their book Reading images Günther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen say picture is not dependent on text, because there is no direct realtion to reality, an image is not a window to reality but a representation of it. Conventions of taking and looking at photos are not chosen but they are inherent in us (a photographer can also consciously choose a convention but often it is not a conscious decision.)
These conventions include framing, camera position, gaze ( of which there are the intradiegetic gaze, camera gaze, our gaze, someone elses's gaze looking at the photo with us), and context.
Literature:
Gillian Rose: Visual methodologies
Janne Seppänen: Visuaalinen kulttuuri
Günther Kress, Lee van Leeuwen: Reading images (social semiotics on which more in a later post)
Van Leeuwen & Jewitt: Handbook of visual analysis
W.J.T. Mitchell: Picture theory. (He talks about the pictorial turn: from typographical culture, linguistic era, we enter a new era of image culture and epistemology. It means there are more pictures, but also that our way of formulating knowledge has turned into image form. Text and image work together, there is no clear distinction between them, they need to be looked at together to understand what kind of knowledge is related to our understanding of pictures. Picture and text together constitute how we understand and form knowledge of image. All media are mixed media, just visual media do not exist. Therefore, what are visuality and pictures in fact? What in fact is the constitution of meaning? It is difficult to find the difference of image and text, theoretically thinking, Mitchell claims.)
Hal Foster's writing: from (art) history to culture and visuality
Posted by hrantavu at November 14, 2005 05:37 PM