First Blog Post!

This blog post is in response to this photograph:


The photo appears to be social documentary: certain elements of style (urban setting, unglamorous subject, naturalistic use of camera/light, appears to be unstaged) lead us to expect a certain form, as Bordwell & Thompson explain in Film Art. This formal structure leads us to expect, in this case, a kind of social statement, often in the form of expose or protest, as well as a very expected, and often provocative, meaning. We expect that the two subjects in the photo have a close relationship, and we assume that the subjects are, perhaps, disenfranchised. The clothes suggest a time period when race relations in America (indeed, to even expect that the subjects are American is an almost automatic and subconscious, but not necessarily true, assumption in American viewers) were still tense, thus casting an additional layer of meaning into the photo, one which might be drawn from, or supported by, the black woman's expression, however one might read it: dejected, steadfast, determined, or something entirely different. I am reluctant to draw many conclusions about this photo despite my own assumptions drawn from its content, especially given my lack of full knowledge of the photo's context - title, photographer, time period, etc. However, based on the different approaches to artistic meaning outlined in Film Art and Practices of Looking, one can begin to extract various meanings and approaches or analyses based on two distinct approaches.

Film Art, while primarily focusing on the structural form of motion pictures, introduces several concepts that are useful in extracting a meaning from a still photo such as the one seen here. Form and its conventions often lead the viewers to form certain expectations about a work, and the form of the photograph is no exception. For example, by forming an assumption that the photograph can be classified as social realist or social documentary photography, we suddenly begin to expect certain things about the work's form: specifically, that it likely is of a subject who has been disenfranchised, that the photograph is trying to uncover some kind of social truth or injustice, and that the photograph is depicting something that is real or true (this last assumption is, not surprisingly, the most problematic, given viewers' propensity and/or reluctance to accept the "truthfulness" of an artistic work). These assumptions, true or not, can all be derived from our expectations about its form. Social documentary photography, for example, often ellicits emotions in our viewer from its form (Bordwell & Thompson, 53-54). In this case, the form of this photographic genre dictates certain conventions to which this photo in particular largely adhere to: a lower-to-middle class working subject, often of non-Caucasian descent, an urban setting, and an intimate portraiture style. Furthermore, this genre of photography is largely informed by, perhaps more so than any other style of photography, by what Bordwell & Thompson define as symptomatic meaning (57). In this case, the symptomatic meaning is almost as easy to define, and perhaps more so given a lack of context, as other types of meaning the photo can have, such as explicit or implicit meaning. Social documentary photography, heavily focused on subjects bear relevance to a "meaning [that], whether referential, explicit, or implicit, is largely a social phenomenon" (Bordwell & Thompson 57). Just as a symptomatic meaning is clearly present in the photo, other meanings - referential, explicit, and implicit - can all be distilled from a close reading of the photo. The referential meaning, the simplest and most essential, simply describes the visual content: A middle-aged black woman holds a white infant on an empty city street. The explicit meaning is more difficult to extract, but is probably most clear in the woman's expression, which has hints of weariness and sadness. The implicit meaning is even more subjective, but the lack of context in the photograph allows for several interpretations: is the woman the baby's mother? Unlikely, but possible. Her nanny or caretaker? Does the child have other parents, or is it adopted or alone? All of these interpretations, each with their own merit, suggest vastly different interpretations, but the juxtaposition of the two different skin colors - made even more obvious by the photographer's stark control of contrast - suggests tense race relations in pre-Civil Rights Movement America, and the social injustices attatched to such a time period. These symptomatic contexts are what drive Bordwell & Thompson's most in-depth and thorough analyses, and are the summary of their analytical approach to meaning. Their definition of evaluation is careful to note the subjectivity of a person's perception of quality compared to aesthetic value of artwork, and thus assert that evaluation of art and form against particular criteria is not useful in extracting meaning, but that analysis is crucial to it instead.

Similarly, Cartwright and Sturken are not concerned with evaluation or aesthetic criteria in their search for analyses of meaning in Practices of Looking, but outline a unique and different approach to extracting types of meaning in photographs. Careful to note the often vast difference between the meaning defined by a viewer, opposed to meaning intended by the producer of an image, they observe that viewers may often see meanings that were either far more complex or detailed than that of the producers, completely in opposition with that of the producers, or simply that they saw no meaning at all. Conversely audiences might seek to find, or otherwise fabricate, meanings in works which the producers had no intention of putting meaning into. Similar to Bordwell and Thompson's use of symptomatic meanings, Cartwright and Sturken outline the practice of "reading images as ideological subjects", in which an image is inherently the product of a certain ideology (Cartwright & Sturken 50-51). This assertion is more broad than the "social phenomenon" which informs symptomatic meanings, but does share the idea that images are generally constructed through inspiration by a certain sociopolitical school of thought. For example, an ideological reading of this particular photograph might lead the viewers, through prior knowledge of the implied context, to assume the photo is informed by the ideologies of civic freedom and equality that were endorsed by the Civil Rights Movement. Cartweight and Sturken take the concept of symptomatic meaning even further by incorporating different social philosophies into their interpretation of viewers' interaction with images. Antonio Gramsci's observations of hegemonic negotiations in particular defines the authors' readings of most of the images, as they observe the vastly different meanings different audiences can infer from an image (Cartwright & Sturken 54-55). The photograph at hand, for example, carries very different meanings for black or white viewers; for viewers in generations before and after the Civil Rights Movement, and other categories, because each of these "classes" of viewers is engaged in a struggle or negotiation within a hegemony. Each of these classes can thus engage in either a dominant-hegemonic reading, a negotiated reading, or an oppositional reading depending on their reactions, social background, personal feelings, gender, ethnicity, and many other factors. Each of these readings reveals a potentially valid meaning that is much richer than a simple symptomatic reading.

Both forms of reading images reveal different meanings which are all influenced by the viewer's interpretations of form, as Bordwell and Thompson suggest, or their class status in a hegemony, as shown in Practices of Looking, among other factors that all contribute to the conclusion that there might very well be no two exact same ways of looking at one image.

Works Cited
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 7th Ed. McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, USA, 2009.