Chapter 1 Review

Images, Power, and Politics

• The world we live in is so saturated with images that have a variety of purpose and intended effects.  These images can produce in us a wide array of emotions and reactions.
• one single image can have multiple purposes and appear in many different settings in order to get different reactions from different types of people.

Arthur Fellig (Weegee) - He was a photographer who's main goal was to take images of things we normally would never think to look at or even want to look at.  The depictions of violent crime scenes in New York, which he later developed on site.

• "The First Murder" - the camera has the capability of capturing an enormous amount of energy and emotion.
• Emmett Till- The gruesome murder of a young man because of hate and racism. His mother had his casket open at the funeral so that everyone would see what had happened.  The picture was published in Jet magazine.

Representation 

Representation- the use of language and image to create meaning about the world around us.

• still lifes had representational meaning by the food they used or objects that symbolized peasant life.
• these paintings produce meanings through the ways that they are composed and rendered and not just in the choices of objects depicted.
• intentionally altering object to give them new meaning

Rene Magritte- "This is Not a Pipe"

• breaking the rules of various systems of representation and to push the boundaries of definition and representation.
• "This is Not a Pipe" is just a painting, or representation of a real pipe.

The Myth of Photographic Truth

• The art of photography is usually associated with realism
• Photographs, unlike drawing, offers and unprecedented parallel between what is here now and what was there then. 

Positivism- a philosophy that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, holds that scientific knowledge is the only authentic knowledge and concerns itself with truths about the world

• photographic camera, in the context of positivism  could be understood as a scientific tool for registering reality more accurately.
• there is a dividing line between what an image denotes and what it connotes
• connotative meanings can change with changes in social context and over time
• it can be argued that all meanings and messages are culturally informed, that there us no such thing as a purely denotative image.

Images and Ideology

• ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures. 
• Photographs were used for documentation purposes, police, mental institutions , prisons  and public health and safety used photography to take documentation of what was going on and what needed to be addressed.

How We Negotiate Meaning of Images

• what symbols do we associate with products, religions, cultures.
• Neutral elements such as tone and color can take on cultural meanings, like the O.J. Simpson mugshot.
• The smile signifies happieness
• Image/sound/word= signifier
• Meaning= Signified
• The production of a sign is dependent on the social, historical and cultural context.

The Value of Images

• why is a Van Gogh worth so much money?
• because it is believed to be among the best examples of the innovative modern style
• the same goes for Pollock, he was a force in the 20th century. The innovation and the awe of something new makes them people who changed how we look at art today.
• But because of how easy it is to reproduce a digital image the price for many items has dropped.

Image Icons

• An icon is an image that refers to something outside if its individual components, something(or someone) that has great symbolic meaning for many people.
• They are of then used to represent universal concepts, emotions and meanings.
• The reference to mother and child.  How now many artists reference this in their art work.