reading the photography

I am writing an essay for my photography course on reading the photograph, and

if there is such a thing as reading the photograph what are your thoughts on

this. Is there a certain key to reading a photograph or do you think that a

photographs audience are free to interpret a photograph as they wish? If a

photograph is read one way by a person and then a different way by another, is

there really a language of photography? Just wondering what your thoughts were?

Thank you

You should have to read "Reading Photographs", by Alberto Manguel. There's a review here:

 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/artsandentertainment/0,6121,449756,00.html

 

He start pointing out that in the middle ages and the followings centuries, people didn't know how to read. So images were the way, with the help of a very specific codification, religious images communicated to every believer the needed concepts to enforce faith, to educated, etc.

 

But nowadays, that codification is lost and, he sustains, is impossible to develop a new and trustable one.

 

So, according Manguel's theory, there's no such thing as "language" photography.

Also find a copy of "The Nature of Photographs" by Stephen Shore, and any of Robert Adams

books: "Beauty in Photography" and "Why People Photograph".

"if there is such a thing as reading the photograph"

 

Some of my best photos must be read to be understood! :-)

 

http://www.fullframeimages.com/

Some links...

 

 

http://nuovo.com/southern-images/analyses.html

 

 

 

http://www.hait.ac.il/staff/ShlomoA/Photography/

 

 

 

 

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME07/Reading_photographs.shtml

My second link, click on "Theory"

" ...Is there a certain key to reading a photograph or do you think that a photographs audience are free to interpret a photograph as they wish?..."

 

Are we free to taste one apple as pleasant and another as sour, maybe too sour for us? Is there a taste police somewhere next to homeland security, Geoff?

 

You sound extremely narrow minded and funny to me.

And you continue laughably, no less:

 

"... If a photograph is read one way by a person and then a different way by another, is there really a language of photography? ... "

 

Have you ever attended a film showing and discussed what people thought about the film afterwards? Is there a language of film? Of drama, of opera, of music? Is there?

 

Of course there is, some forms of drama (Noh), some forms of music (throat singing of Inuits) may be totally foreign to you; yet there is a human language of all the arts, even, or especially since we all react to (=read) art so differently.

 

Orwell 1984 is long gone; you are its last (?) adherent, are you?

 

What you reallly need to discover is that words themselves (= everyday language) carries mostly ambiguous meaning and many interpretations. Yet we all speak.

 

You think and ask somewhat awfully narrow mindedly, I am afraid. Grow into your self, please. There is room, no fear.

"You should have to read "Reading Photographs""

 

My bad, I should have written: "Reading Pictures" (title of the book).

I don't think that Geoff deserve such a rude answer, his questions were more of a dialectical kind. He is shooting a question way above your levelling point. Just MHO.

.

 

Yeah, every "reader" brings their own "dictionary" to "reading" an image. Try putting a bloke clutching a shotgun and a dead rabbit hanging by it's ears and imagine that picture as the cover of "Field and Stream" magazine and also as the cover of "Vegan Times" magazine, and them imagine the different editorial cover story in each magazine based on the SAME PCITURE! ;-) Of course EVERYTHING can be "read", and a challenge for us as creative artists is to anticipate and control the reading of our images ... or not, and enjoy the serendipitous reading from our audience!

 

Click! Peter Blaise, Photograph is Free Speech

<b>Frank</b> said in part: <i>Of course there is, some forms of drama (Noh), some forms of music (throat singing of Inuits) may be totally foreign to you; yet there is a human language of all the arts, even, or especially since we all react to (=read) art so differently. </i><p>

 

Sir, I find that statement to be ambiguous. First you address specific fields of art as having a language, then you seem to go into a relativistic twilight zone. What, exactly, do you mean?

 

<p>

<i>Orwell 1984 is long gone; you are its last (?) adherent, are you?</i><p>

Gee, Fred, did you get up on the wrong side of the matrix this morning?

<p>

<i>What you reallly need to discover is that words themselves (= everyday language) carries mostly ambiguous meaning and many interpretations. Yet we all speak. </i><p>

And it is clear that we can also misinterpret as evinced by your taking a ballistic tangent to Geoff's benign, possibly provocative query.

Hi Frank, <p> <i> You think and ask somewhat awfully narrow mindedly, I am afraid. Grow into your self, please. There is room, no fear. </i> <p> So, um, Frank, how do you think browbeating someone with your alleged superiority is going to make the less fearful of, say, freely speaking their mind? <p> Take care, James

Hi Geoff, <p> I'd hazard to say that everything has its own language. Not just in the arts but everywhere. As humans, we are endlessly creative. Genre photographers have their own language. Lovers have their own language. Best friends. And as Frank pointed out, all of these languages carry and accompanying limitless number of interpretations and distortion. <p> There's no 'right' way to do/interpret anything. That said, there's definitely spheres of common experience and common interpretation - and those are the points where we connect.

Frank, sorry to be so defensive, but when I asked the questions "

 

I am writing an essay for my photography course on reading the photograph, and if there is such a thing as reading the photograph what are your thoughts on this. Is there a certain key to reading a photograph or do you think that a photographs audience are free to interpret a photograph as they wish? If a photograph is read one way by a person and then a different way by another, is there really a language of photography? Just wondering what your thoughts were? Thank you"

 

I am actually asking questions rather than making a statement

"Is there a certain key to reading a photograph or do you think that a photographs audience are free to interpret a photograph as they wish? If a photograph is read one way by a person and then a different way by another, is there really a language of photography? Just wondering what your thoughts were? Thank you"

 

There is no key as there are only bias'. What the photographer thought at the moment the shutter was tripped, don't matter. Viewing an image is a democratic process as nobody is right and nobody is wrong cause it's not a test. No education required.

 

Now, one can go deep so as to understand more than the superficial (cliche) but that's a free choice thingy, not a requirement as, if you want to be a good farmer, you need to learn how to grow things. Same thing with photography. If you want to be a good photographer, you need to learn the trade. If you want to be a good photographic artist, it doesn't hurt to learn photographic history in order to understand where photographic history came from and where you the contemporary photographer would like to take photography. And as a viewer, you can eat anywhere you want. Same with photography. How well you educate yourself (bias), will help you get something out of the images in front of you. The more you're educated in photographic history (biasing), the more you'll understand and appreciate what's infront of you.

 

Hmmmmmm!

 

"Please present proof of education requirements to the clerk at the front of the gallery, before entering. Sans proper accreditation, you will not be allowed to view any of the images within the gallery. Thank-you for understanding."

 

Being a democratic process, it is understood that the viewer has a responsibility to learn and understand in order to better understand what they're viewing and how the images they're viewing fits into the historical scheme of the photographic continuum; context.

 

It's free choice if one wishes to wallow in the cliche or rise above in understanding (bias/taught how and what to think) and hopefully have a good time in doing so.

 

Hope the above helps.

Photography, or any art for that matter, is just another lanuage that people "speak". Unfourtunatly it is a diffucult one to translate.

 

The photographer makes an image of something in a language he has learned from photographing and seeing other images throughout his life.

 

The viewer, if they pretty much saw the same kinds of images in their lives, will pretty well be able to understand what was "said".

 

 

IN reality, we all have different expiriences in life, we all interpret images differently, and words, and sound, an anything else we can interpret.

 

For example, when I was little, the Wizard of Oz was just what it was: Dorthy, the tin man, the lion, the witches. To me it was a fanciful modern fairytale. Now after learining things from american history, I see it as a satire based on 1890s politics. OZ is ounce(oz.) for example, referring to debates about the gold standard and using silver to offset deflation. Dorthy represents the niave and lost american people...and so on...Which is the right way to think about the wizard of OZ? Who's to say...

 

We bring to any image, text, or song our own ideas and interperatations, and either a lot or a little is actually conveyed from the maker, depending on only the commonality between the maker and the reciever.

This is why there are religious factions all over, killing eachother, becasue they interparate a few words or cartoons differently.

 

To each his own...

Reading a photograph must be similar to reading any other visual image. One looks for clues as to its meaning if it suggests that there is something deeper than you would first think. Visual signals, symbols and stereotypes can suggest something more.

 

There are thousands of ordinary pictures that are simply what they are. But for an exercise, look at pictures from the past or distant places that show things you can't recognize. Any suggestive meaning is lost because there isn't enough of a connection for recognition. Consider the family photo album. Forgotten elderly Aunt whats-her-name? This picture would remind someone familiar with her of stories about her, but it means nothing to the rest of us.

 

Describing the language of pictures is a lofty goal you must temper by telling the reader exactly which ones you mean. Who is doing the looking? What visual signals do they get? As with any other human language it only takes a few people living separated from others in many ways to develop their own variation known mainly to them.

 

What do emotions look like? What is common in human experience? These things will be widely understood. Language? That's up to you.

Since you have to be the author of your paper, I will offer some hints to get you going. <p>

 

Language: There is no semiotics of photography.<p>

 

Sociology: See "The Problem(s) of Social Reality"<p>

 

Psychology: Cognitive psychology - how one frames reality in order to cope, make sense of the world. It is language based. (so there's your infinite loop back to language) :)<p>

 

And surf for an excellent article that describes a case in which a remote African culture was shown photograhs and they could not see the objects in the photograph as representations of anything - they could not "see" the photograph at all. It made no sense.

 

That should demonstrate that there is no language of photography; there are only cultural interpretations. However, in certain domains 'reading' a photograph has strict rules - such as in aerial recon photography interpretation. Making certain pictures also has strident rules and metrics - such as aerial mapping, scientific photography, and so-forth.

<p>

You certainly need more than repeating the above, however the hints should direct you to authortative resources.

 

Hope this helps.

 

(btw - I teach photography part-time at the university level. Best of luck in your quest!)

Two more hints - look for an introduction to Discourse Theory and Discourse Analysis. You do not have to buy into the theories, but it will show you some of the dynamics and problems of framing reality in language.

<p>

Finally, for amusement you might look into the historic effort to find the Perfect Language, presumably the root, or first language of humankind which the proponets believe is pure, possibly divinely given. A short and lively criticism of the subject can be found in Umberto Eco's <u>Serendipities</u> and more in <u>The Search for the Perfect Language</u>.

.

 

Earlier: "... there is no language of photography..."

 

Just because someone doesn't understand doesn't mean there's no language there.

 

However, what we all are saying is that there's no "one" language there, but generally there are at least "two" languages - a specific photographer's language and a specific viewer's language - and when those languages do not coincide, we get miscommunication, and when they coincide (rare eh?), there is effective communication, somewhat.

 

So called "professional" or "commercial" photographers do not claim greatness because they communicate with a universal language of photography, but usually because they most clearly identify a narrowly selected target audience's visual language and then "speak" (photograph) in THAT language very well.

 

Same with music and so on. Just because someone can't "hear" the music someone else creates doesn't mean there's no language or meaning to their music, it's just "lost in translation" so to speak! ;-)

 

Ethnocentrism causes blindness and insensitivity to outside languages. Shame.

 

Anyway, the point here may be a cyclical search we all are making on what it is we want to see and share in our photography, and I salute that perennial search for clarity.

 

Carry on!

 

Click! Peter Blaise, Minolta Rokkor Alpha DiMage Photographer

Geoff,

 

it seems that I just reacted to your biassd (as I perceived them dreadfully so) questions in an offended way. Sorry.

 

But to make my point, people will often answer into a spelled out bias. And I found the questions offensively narrow and presupposed ... Of course these were all questions, but ill-posed ones are usuallay not answered well. My two cents, and sorry if these questions are not reflections of you. How did they come to be phrased such?

I found a great essay by Leo Tolstoy several months ago. I already put the link in one of the other threads, but I'll post it here as well since it is applicable to this topic.

 

http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html

 

The topic of the essay is "What is Art?". The reason it applies to this topic is because it focuses primarily on communication, which Tolstoy considers to be fundamental to any real work of art. In fact, he judges art by how clearly and sincerly a work of art communicates the experience and emotion of the artist to the viewers.

 

If you look at a photograph and are not able to read anything into it, consider the fact that the photograph might be poorly executed, not a problem with your ability to read it. That may be true even if the image is popular (Tolstoy calls it counterfeit art). I'm sure there's a much higher percentage of "counterfeit art" today than in Tolstoy's day, which makes reading art that much more difficult.

 

If I was teaching a course, I would make my students read the essay several times. I don't know that I agree with everything in it (or even understand everything). I wish it included critiques of specific works of art. They would likely have better answered your questions had they been included.

 

Hope this helps.

No problem Frank, I had already formed my own opinion on the matter of "reading a photograph" a long time ago. I was asking these questions as part of research to back up my essay for my degree course and also to get some help on other papers I should be looking at to help my essay move along.

<b>Geoff</b> <i> [...] I had already formed my own opinion on the matter of "reading a photograph" a long time ago.</i>

In the spirit of net-wisdom, would you consider sharing your opinion with those of us who have done the same?

Yep, I'm curious too. Please tell us.