CHAPTER NINE: Pictures for a Purpose

Overview

Images do not just pop up out of nowhere. Someone has to create them, sometimes with great effort, and someone has to make them available to be seen. In addition, your behaviors and decisions lead you to the image or you would not have encountered it. As an object in the world, images are created for reasons and used for various purposes, among these the communication of ideas and information.


The Image as an Object

Images are things.  As we have suggested throughout this course, they are very special kinds of things that we become involved with in very profound ways, but they are also objects the world.  And because they are, images become part of the commerce and function of the world, just like other things.

We use a pen because we want to write something.  We use email for the purpose of communicating. You take notes to help you remember something and use them to study for tests.  Images are used too…and in a lot of different ways.

The Use of an image refers to any ways in which the image has a function or value as an object in the world.  An interesting aspect of this is that these functions or values can often have very little – and sometimes nothing at all – to do with what is within the frame of the image itself.  While both Content and Appearance involve getting lost in the matrix within the frame, understanding the meaning of the image through its Use involves moving outside the frame and seeing the image as an object in the world subject to cultural, social, commercial, and political forces. Often those forces are at work not because of what is depicted in the image but simply due to the fact that image exists and can be used in certain ways.


The Reason for the Image

If Content is about what the image shows and Appearance is about how it shows it, Use is about why it is there at all and what we do with it once we have it.  This is a complicated issue but as an introduction to it, we can think about this from two different perspectives…reason and purpose.

The reason for the image refers to why the image was made and shown.  In other words, the reason it exists at all.  Images, of course, do not just pop up by themselves out of nowhere.  Every mage exists as a result of a long series of actions and decisions by different people sometimes over a long period of time.

Why was it created in the first place?  Why did it ever come into the public realm?  Why was it shown where you saw it?  These are all questions about the use of the image as an object, specifically pertaining to the reasons that it appeared in places where it could be encountered by a viewer.


The Purpose of the Image

The purpose of the image refers to what we do with it once we have it.  That “we” can refer to individuals, groups, even whole cultures.  Images are commonly used, for example, for communication as a kind of visual language.  In this case their purpose is to enable us to trade ideas and information. We use images in this way all the time to make a record of an event, establish a fact, make money, provide information, make a point, prove a scientific truth, make a legal case, make someone laugh, and so on.

Sometimes the reason (why it was created or shown) and the purpose (what it is made to do) are similar and sometimes they are not. A painter may produce a painting, for example, as a form of self-expression and we may use it culturally (in an art or psychology class for instance) to decipher what the painter might have been feeling when he or she painted it. On the other hand, if the painting is being used simply to cover a crack in a wall, then the original reason it was created may not be that relevant to its current use.


On Denotation and Connotation

In the same way that the Content and Appearance direct our attention as we explore the image, making some things stand out and others fade from our focus, Use too can alter the overall meaning of the image in this way.

Use can affect the impact of the denotation and connotation of the image, for example. Remember that denotation refers to content that points directly to something while connotation elicits more general associations. As we probe images for their meaning, we tend to both make direct denotative connections ("that's the US flag") and broader connotative ones ("that suggests patriotism").

But consider a photograph of a car. The denotative message may be the car itself or its details and the connotative message may be one of luxury and expense. We might notice both aspects of the meaning. Yet appearing in a magazine to illustrate automotive design, we might be drawn to study the styling details, the denotation. But in a magazine about the way millionaire's live, we might be drawn to the connotations...the overall connection to money and the good life.

In this way, Use can guide our attention as we probe the image for meaning, influencing what we notice and focus on.

As an example, take a look at this ad for All-Bran Cereal. The image is being used to sell a certain familiar benefit of bran and if you are aware of that then what is going on in the background becomes hilarious (or disgusting, depending on your sensibility) But you notice it. Without that use - if the pitchman was selling All-Wheat Cereal instead - you would never notice the background at all.


Communication, Value, Power

Communicating information is a vast realm of Use for images but it is not the only way we use them as objects. We also use images as a means of negotiating values in our society. The constant production and publication of images for this purpose serves as a kind of social contract or agreement in which we rehearse and secure our own values. Think, for example, about the ways that what we call a family – what one is and how it should look – are established and reinforced through images in the media. From the wholesome quartets of the 1950s up to the more complex combinations of the moment, images of families and what they look like not only visualize our ideas about it, they help create it. The same of true of many shared values like beauty, threat, race, gender, sexuality, etc.

Power, the imposing of one person's will on another, is yet another area in which are used not just to influence but to coerce. Commercials that impel us to change our bodies, visual statements from governments that change our opinions about the world, documentary films that manipulate our emotions or attitudes...these are all ways in which images can be used to negotiate power relationships in our visual world.

Use as a Form of Critique

Some writers on these topics feel that Use is not only criticial to understanding images, it is the single most important factor in their meaning. Take a look, for example, at the reading linked to this chapter. It is from the book Ways of Seeing by critic John Berger.

This is a challenging reading largely because Berger suggests something quite radical in his discussion of two paintings by the Dutch artists Frans Hals...that the most important visual impact and significance of the paintings does not come from the details of Content and Appearance. Instead he suggests that if we consider the power relationships that were behind its creation, we will understand the image on a much more profound level than if we merely focus on the visual impression we get from it.

Berger claims that if we only focus on the meaning of the image through its colors and tones and rhythms, we miss the much more significant impact of it which, in his view, is what it reveals about the drama between a poor artist and the rich people he is forced to honor through his sweat and toil because they are his only access to money.

Berger, in other words, is forcing us to shift our attention away from the look of the image and towards its Use as a means of establishing power in a culture, in this case 17th century Holland.


Image Assignment

Find an image in a magazine (either one that accompanies an article or an image from an advertisement) and write about what you think the creators of it wanted to make you think or feel and whether they succeeded or not.

Extra Credit

Find an image in a magazine (either one that accompanies an article or an image from an advertisement) and write about it by focusing on its reason and purpose.

You can do this by thinking about the following questions, which are only meant to help you consider this topic...other ideas may occur to you too.

1.  Why do you think the image was created?
2.  What do you think the creator(s) hoped to communicate to you?
3. Specifically what attitudes, behaviors, or responses do you think they wanted to elicit from you?
4. How does what the image shows (what it is a picture of) support your theory?
5. What aspects of its appearance (colors, shapes, composition, etc.) support your ideas about its purpose?
6. Does the location of the image (the kind of magazine or where it appears in the magazine) have any relevance here?