Pictures have no meaning
Today's class surprised me. I missed the meaning of the Barthes article by a few feet. I did not realize that Barthe was saying that images have no meaning, that is, until we use our cultural background and programming. What a revelation! Without understanding, bias, influence, perspective, individual interpretation - an image is just that...an image. It has no intention, no hidden meaning, it just is. We define the image through the previously stated concepts. You know, that is pretty enlightening. I worked for a newspaper in advertising and we had to put together ads for local businesses. While I have some knowledge of the way ads "manipulate" this article helped me decipher the manipulation better. Of course, the newspaper does not want to explain to its rookie employee the subtleties in an ad that say BUY BUY BUY because I honestly think that I would have been like "This is Bullshit"!
I was a bit confused on where art (paintings, drawings, etc) fit in. Is it exempt? Why? Is it that much different than photos or images? They both invoke emotion, meaning, and connotation -- right? I have to keep reminding myself that the image is just an image...I am the one who brings meaning to it. For example, the Katrina victims and the blatant discrimination....OF COURSE there is meaning there...what fool can't see that? But actually, it is just a picture of a black person in the water with a trash bag and two white people in the water with a trash bag. Beyond that, my interpretation (with help from the captions).
My mind is still racing....
I was a bit confused on where art (paintings, drawings, etc) fit in. Is it exempt? Why? Is it that much different than photos or images? They both invoke emotion, meaning, and connotation -- right? I have to keep reminding myself that the image is just an image...I am the one who brings meaning to it. For example, the Katrina victims and the blatant discrimination....OF COURSE there is meaning there...what fool can't see that? But actually, it is just a picture of a black person in the water with a trash bag and two white people in the water with a trash bag. Beyond that, my interpretation (with help from the captions).
My mind is still racing....
posted by Trisha | 5:00 PM
2 Comments:
My interpretation was also quite a bit off from our class discussion. I was glad we had it.
As for the art part, I thought that art was considered symbols, and representation (maybe even already an interpretation of something else). I think that's why they're considered different by Barthes. I don't know if any of this makes sense. . .I hope it helped some. If not, just reply and we'll talk about it more!
I think that, after reading someone's blog, sorry I forgot who, that mentioned orange and yellow in McDonalds signs to make you hungry. Well, I think back to grade school are class when we analyzed, haha, paitnings and such, and when there was a big red dot your eyes are automoatically drawn to it, and we would comment on that, and red (and any color)has cultural conotations, blood, love, passion, evil, sensual, etc etc. If we were all lobsters maybe we would think of the color blue as blood and passion etc etc. So we bring our predispositions to every thing that we look at, be it an ad or a piece of "fine art", but then you have people like Warhol who blend soup lables, much like the italitan ad, with fine art. It is so hard to make a distinction I feel. People put that poster of Micheal up on the wall AS art. And wasn't all of Wed discussion about the symbolism in it... i think excluding "fine art" is like trying to define literature... but I may be way off base here, I very often am
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