When reviewing the course notes, I thought this chapter would be one that I would find particularly interesting. I had read a summary of Barthes' theories in Visual Culture, and was looking forward to reading in more detail.
I have also read more widely during this part of the course, with special reference to chapters on photography. These have particular relevance to the Assignment as photography features highly in advertising.
The first project was a sort of practice Assignment: annotating a couple of advertisements. This got me reading more widely into some graphic design theory: Fibonacci sequences, looking left to right, that I used briefly in the Assignment. These articles presented a different take on advertising: written by practitioners for practitioners and in a way 'taking for granted' (indeed deliberately enhancing) the manipulative messages that Barthes and others highlight in their treatises. It is important to remember that many people's livelihoods depend on advertising; it is their job to make us view our world in controlled ways. That is an integral part of modern consumerism. Barthes and others help us acknowledge and understand the visual influences that are aimed at our subconscious; where I feel they stray too far at times is an implication that those influences are by definition malevolent - a sort of insidious establishment based impact of a capitalist based society. Not all advertising is bad.
The project on structuralist analysis of two paintings helped to formulate an approach that I used for the first part of the Assignment, using the concepts of form, medium, allusion and purpose.
As well as a habit of using different terminology for the same thing, Barthes often uses phrases that challenge the reader to understand his meaning. Such is the passage that "meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning". I found an interesting montage by John Heartfield to annotate for the project.
The Death of the Author and Deconstruction are challenging topics, both to understand and to apply to Visual Culture. Foucault's essay takes a fairly extreme view of depersonalisation; too far in my view as it almost defies anyone to suggest new theories or concepts as the author would have neither acknowledgement nor copyright over those ideas. I used work from Banksy and Cindy Sherman on the associated project. I used the deconstruction concepts by comparing two covers of The Economist.
I enjoyed writing the Assignment. Unlike previous Assignments, I had a good idea of what I wanted to use well beforehand, and researched source documents in advance. Off course reading on the internet and Photography: A Critical Introduction provided material and analysis; many of the references are not actually academic research but reflect the us to advertising in practice as discussed above. Late on, I changed my mind as to which image to use as wanted to discuss gender issues (the first choice was a financial services advertisement).
1,500 words (even excluding direct quotations) is quite short for an essay on this topic. I could easily have written 5,000 words as had to skim over some important concepts such as paradigmatic analysis and Hall's theories of encoding/decoding. These are both very useful topics to take forward into further study in future photography modules.
One recurring themes of this course to date is the number of French writers. It is perhaps no coincidence as France has a very strong philosophical background; there is a history of holistic analysis as opposed to Anglo-Saxon tendencies to analyse everything. Visual Culture suits wider thinking, which doubtless explains why so many French writers are featured in the course. Their works are not always easy reading. That is not down to the translation but to commonalities in being verbose; using duplicate terminology for the same concept; and repeating themselves. I dislike of writing that is not clear, as there is a suspicion that it is not clear for a reason; that the author wishes to present his ideas as being rather more enlightening that perhaps is justified.
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