Reflection and Summary of Chapter 1: Images, Power, and Politics

Chapter one covers a broad and dense amount of information regarding images and their power. The 40 page chapter is broken down into categories on Representation, Myth of Photographic Truth, Images and Ideology, How We Negotiate the Meaning of Images, Value of Images, and Image Icons. (I predict this to be a long blog post!) It really surprised me that such a simple subject as pictures can reveal something so complex; I found myself rereading and really trying to absorb and digest the text.

A reoccurring theme in the chapter, that is first established in the introduction is power; “Looking is a social practice…To be made to look, [or] to try to get someone else to look at you…entails a play of power” (9). I also found it interesting of the fact that we use looking to communicate, and even when we choose to look away or close our eyes, those activities still have meaning. The power of a image can really influence the viewer.

After the introduction, we read about representation, which is referred to as “the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us” (12). Furthermore, we construct the meaning of things through the process of representing them. I liked how they gave the example of still life paintings. Many people look at still lifes as just a reflection of objects, but in reality, they may be loaded with symbolism and can even provoke a certain lifestyle without using the human figures.

The idea of photographic truth, or more specifically, a photograph is a sliver of real life, or a copy of the real world, is very false. The photographer is the artist and has always been able to manipulate what is in the frame, and now-a-days, with new digital editing, photography is more and more subjective. What also caught my interest was how “photographs always indicate a kind of mortality, evoking death in the moments in which they seem to stop time” (18). Whenever I look at family photos, even if they were just taken a year ago, I always get this bittersweet feeling; a mixture of aging, sweet memories, and death. This feeling I always get when looking at photographs actually has a term: punctum.

The next section, “Images and Ideology” discusses how images are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology. What is ideology? “Ideologies are systems of beliefs that exist within all cultures” (23). Commonly, people think of propaganda as the only form of ideology. However, this is false, ideologies are not always thought of a negative, and are defined as broad, shared sets of values and beliefs. The chapter then continues to talk about how we negotiate the meanings of images. The first sentence to this section caught my eye, “…we often use these tools of looking automatically, without giving them much thought. Images are produced according to social and aesthetic conventions” (26). Its really amazing how much our brain filters through the thousands of images we see daily, and how we decode this images my interpretations and clues of various kinds. The concept of semiotics are used to interpret these images.

The value of images was a section I found quite interesting, “Some of the information we bring to reading images has to do with what we perceive their value to be in a culture at large” (34). This makes great sense as an image doesn’t hold a real value (that is unless its make from actual gold of something of the sort), but is awarded different kinds of value (social, political, monetary, etc.) Look at any famous piece of artwork – Van Gogh couldn’t sell squat when he was alive, but now people are paying millions for his work. Finally, the last section of the book is about image icons, and how many images simply hold the value of icons. As stated in the chapter, and icon is an image that refers to something outside of its individual components; great symbolic meaning for many people; represents universal concepts. But icons do not represent universal values; icons “meanings are always historically and contextually produced” (40). What I found interesting this that icons are specific to certain cultures and certain moments in time; when I here the word icon, I think of an everlasting symbol – but clearly I am wrong. The chapter ends with an examination of the complexity of contemporary visual culture spanning from 16th century art, to the performances of pop sensation Madonna, to the new craze of You Tube. Great, very in-depth chapter.