Chapter 3

Communication and the Visual

Introduction

We have argued that seeing is a kind of reading that uses technologies and various skills in
framing, selecting, editing, and decoding the visual material that surrounds us. Perhaps no one
needs finely honed skills to function in the ordinary sense as a visual being. Indeed, most of the
time, people get along by relying on habitual ways of seeing and making sense of what they see.
Visual literacy, in contrast, is a very complex practice that demands more than just everyday
practices: it requires specific skills in the processes of seeing and reading. The relationship
between representation and reality and how visual experiences are also moments of
communication.

Specific Objectives

At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:

- Analyze how visual culture acts as a medium of communication.

- Discuss the importance of visual Literacy
- Develop skills in how visual culture acts as a medium of communication.

Duration

Chapter 1: Communication and the Visual = 3 hours

(2 hours discussion; 1 hour
assessment)

Lesson Proper

The Seeing Subject

Seeing is on the one hand an automatic, physiological function we perform without

thinking and, on the other, a complex and absorbing process. Eyes 3 communication and
the visual 57 communication and the visual introduction the ‘seeing subject’ Reading the
Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:37 AM Page 57 fascinate us. They are the ‘windows to the soul’;
parents tell their children to ‘look me in the eye’ as proof that they aren’t lying; lovers
and flirters use eye contact to seize, hold and caress the object of their desire. And
writers, philosophers and social scientists have long wrestled with what it means to be
‘seeing subjects’: human beings whose feature characteristics are that they access the
physical and intellectual world through vision. Seeing, and making sense of what we see,
are thus neither simple nor natural. Indeed, the art historian Bates Lowry notes that our
ability to see is like our ability to speak: ‘We are not born with a knowledge of how to
see, any more than we are born with a knowledge of how to speak English. We are born
only with the ability to learn how’ (1967: 13). W.T.J. Mitchell extends this sense of the
complexity of seeing, by drawing a distinction between reading (‘decipherment,
decoding, interpretation’) and spectatorship, or ‘just looking’ (Mitchell 1994: 16).
Provided we have the physiological ability, we can all look; however, our ability to ‘read’
or ‘see’ (that is, to interpret) is contingent: what we see is not what we get— rather, it is
what our eyes have been socialized to see, and our minds to interpret. So, what we make
of what we see is determined by our cultural context, our own habitus, what we know
about how meanings are made in our culture and the field in which we are ‘seeing’.
Victor Burgin explains this in writing about the act of looking at a photograph of a set of
stones: ‘If I go on to remark that the photograph depicts a temple, that the temple is
ruined, and that it is Greek, then I am relying upon knowledge that is no longer “natural”,
“purely visual”; I am relying upon knowledge that is cultural, verbally transmitted and, in
the final analysis, ideological’ (Burgin 1999: 45). We are not just living creatures who
notice what is around us, but subjects—individuals in society—who learn to see in
particular ways, and for purposes. The twentieth century produced several critics and
theorists, from several fields and disciplines, whose work deals extensively with how we
see, what we make of what we see and what it means to be a ‘seeing subject’. Whether
they were concerned with individual identity or with how societies more generally are
organized, each turns to an idea about visuality to explain what it means to be human. So,
as W.T.J. Mitchell writes: mental imagery belongs to psychology and epistemology;
optical 58 communication and the visual imagery to physics; graphic, sculptural, and
architectural imagery Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:37 AM Page 58 to the art
historian; verbal imagery to the literary critic; perceptual images occupy a kind of border
region where physiologists, neurologists, psychologists, art historians, and students of
optics find themselves collaborating with philosophers and literary critics. (Mitchell
1986: 10–11) We can, for example, read the works of American psychologist and
philosopher William James for examples of how neurological/ physiological information
makes sense of how people see and what this means about how they understand
themselves and their world. Or we can read psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud and
psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan for examples of how, in their disciplines, images are
considered central to an individual’s personality and behavior. Freud made much of the
deviance he called ‘scopophilia’, or the desiring gaze we bend upon the world—‘I am
what I desire; and I desire what I gaze upon’ (1905)—while Lacan, who followed and
developed Freud’s theories, argued that identity emerges at what he calls the ‘mirror
stage’ (Lacan 1977), the point at which a small child can recognize itself as an individual,
separate from its mother and from all the other matter of the world. Other writers have
explored visual culture to explain broader issues of society and culture. Anthropologists
such as Claude Levi Strauss, for example, make sense of the life, values and organization
 of traditional cultures by analyzing the sorts of clothes they wear, the shape of the
dwellings they build, and the colors, lines and textures of their decorative art. Cultural
theorists like Stuart Hall take a similar approach in analyzing contemporary cultures: they
argue that the way in which visual objects are produced and displayed, and what counts
as beautiful or as valuable tell us a great deal about what that society’s values are, what
sort of meanings (or stories) are dominant, and who has power in the community. And
theorists of spatiality, such as Henri Lefebvre, analyze visual culture as data that can be
used to explain everyday life. The interior design and the scale of a home or public
building, for example, give clues to the value of the individuals who occupy those spaces;
the design of a map can show how a society understands space and dimensions. During
the second half of the twentieth century, writers like Fredric Jameson and Jean
Baudrillard analyze visual culture as instances of what is called postmodernism: a set of
theories and practices which describe the contemporary world as a kind of MTV clip, a
plethora of images whirling in promiscuous uncertainty (or, as Moe from the television
cartoon ‘The Simpsons’ defines it, postmodernism is ‘Weird for the communication and
the visual 59 Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:37 AM Page 59 sake of weird’). Yet
others, like Paul Virgilio, have turned their attention to digital communication
technologies as providing ways of understanding questions of reality and virtuality.
Throughout the literature, it seems, our universe—from the widest sweep of space and
history to the most secret inner self—is understood as something we grasp through vision
and the metaphors of seeing.

Seeing and Sense

But despite this theoretical emphasis on visuality and/as identity, there is considerable
anxiety about what it means to access the world visually rather than through literary
means. The media routinely run scare stories about declining literacy levels, and lard
these with complaints that, though young people might be very competent in dealing with
video games, movies, television, and graphic novels, they don’t read novels, poems, and
newspapers, and therefore they (and by extension, society) have lost a precious skill. It’s
not just tabloid editors, educators or frustrated parents who sense that society is becoming
increasingly visual; many theorists have weighed into this argument too. Nicholas
Mirzoeff, for example, expresses a widely held view when he writes that ‘modern life
takes place onscreen . . . Human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever
before’ (Mirzoeff 1999: 1). Of course, this is not in fact saying very much, because
Mirzoeff does not point out precisely what he means by ‘visualizing’ or ‘visualized’
experience, and how it might be different from the visualizing and visual experiences of
people in other times and cultures. After all, human beings have always lived in a world
that is packed with visual objects and phenomena and have always looked at and made
sense of the things about them. The early cave paintings are testament to the importance,
from the beginnings of (textual) human history, of seeing and reflecting on what we see.
 Mirzoeff does argue, though, that the material we now view is far more complex than the
sorts of objects and phenomena that characterized the visual domain of earlier centuries.
Common sense and basic observation would suggest that this is a reasonable argument,
and several writers agree with Mirzoeff. Donald Hoffman, for instance, points to the
complexity of material incorporated in an MTV show, any video game or visual reality
experiences (Hoffman 1998: xii). Even a television advertisement may include a startling
combination of shapes and colors, rapid movements and jumps from scene to scene (and
of focus within scenes), morphing and animation, song, and story, and all the multiple
associations of 60 communication and the visual sound and movement with purely visual
phenomena which film seeing and sense Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:37 AM
Page 60 and digital technologies enable. Urban landscapes, too, are packed with visual
images—building designs, advertising billboards, the many shapes and colors of vehicles,
store windows, mailboxes, cashpoints, traffic lights and so on.

Visual Saturation

Look at the image presented in Figure 3.1a. It is an ordinary noticeboard located in an

ordinary city street. It makes use of no digital technology, has no cunning printing
devices, sound, or movement, and makes no specialized use of linear perspective. Hence,
we could say it is a less complex text than, say, a video game. But the multiple shapes,
textures and sizes of the papers attached to the board, the complex layering of individual
parts, the range of fonts, styles, and layout—and of course the various colors not
reproduced here—all render it a text that is not easily accessed. The process of reading it
is terribly complex too because it is loaded with distractions. Where do you begin to read
this text: at the top left? At the center? At the ‘noisiest’ or the largest sheet? And how do
you read it sensibly when you are being bombarded by a baffling array of distractions—
the sounds and movements of people passing by; cars and buses on the road just who pats
a person on the back in addition to giving praise can increase the impact of the message.

behind you, the click of the traffic lights signalling pedestrians to cross the road; the hiss
of automatic doors opening and closing; the texture, shape and color of the wall and
pavement that frame the noticeboard. The clamour of colour and sound that interfere with
the reading of the simplest visual text, and the range of signs within any text, mean that
there seems no end to the variety and complexity of the visual matter before our eyes. But
the number of signs we see (and process) in any given day, the volume of individual signs
in a text, the array of colors, the degree of movement and even the degree of distraction
involved in its reading do not necessarily constitute the level of its visual complexity. The
art historian James Elkins argues that we are in fact less visually complex now than in
earlier periods. Genuine complexity, he writes, emerges at the Renaissance (because of
the many new visual technologies and systems of perception developed then) and ends at
the late nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he suggests,
Western principles of thought and perception had moved away from visual to written
forms, producing what he calls ‘generations of speed-readers who can only read simple
[visual] sentences’ (Elkins 2002: 97). Certainly, digital communication technologies—
some video games, MTV, web browsers—encourage a fleeting, flickering glance rather
 than the concentrated gaze associated with art. And even art receives less and less
attention; Jeannette Winterson in Art Objects (1995: 8) suggests that her readers try
spending an hour looking at a single work in an art gallery and promises great return on
this investment, but curators of art museums have told me that the viewing standard is
more like fifteen seconds per work. What this suggests is that the apparent complexity of
contemporary visual texts is not substantiated by how people use the texts, because the
design of texts made and disseminated through digital communication technologies lends
them to the easy reading—or ‘looking’—of habituation.

Images as Sign

The notion that, despite all the intuitive evidence, we are no longer as visually complex as
people in earlier periods is developed by the US historian Martin Jay (1993, 1995). His central
argument is that we are living in a deeply nonvisual period, not because thereare now fewer
visual texts or because the texts are simpler in design, but because we make sense of the world
by using non-visual analytic devices. Jay’s point is supported by recent philosophical writings:
the nineteenth62 communication and the visual century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for
example, wrote of his images as signs Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 62 own
visual skepticism: ‘I do not myself believe that anyone has looked into the world with an equally
profound degree of suspicion.’ (Nietzsche, 1986: preface). The early twentieth-century
philosopher Martin Heidegger, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s work, was likewise skeptical
about the extent to which we can rely on visual skills, and famously opposed to the centrality of
the seeing subject in Western thought. He argued that aural perception was more reliable than
visual (Jay 1993: 268). Twentieth-century scholarship continued in this strain, because it was
marked by what is called the ‘linguistic turn’—a move within the Humanities to focus almost
exclusively on literary texts, and to use the analytical devices associated with literary texts to
make sense of society, visual images, individual psychology and so on. All social practices, in
other words, were understood as meaning-making practices, or semiotic events (Evans and Hall
1999: 2). Under this analytical principle, visual texts are considered to communicate according to
linguistic rather than iconographical rules, and scholars who subscribe to this view argue that we
can approach them just as we might approach a novel or other written text. Semiotics is certainly
an effective tool for analysis because, as we indicated in the introduction, it deals with signs—
anything which stands for something—and, in general, even obscure visual images can easily be
imbued with some meaning.

Images ang Meaning

The semiotic principle of analyzing signs

is attractive because it makes good sense
in terms of how people approach texts,
and it has been thoroughly tested over a
considerable period. Though it is usually
associated with the French linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure and his Course in
 General Linguistics (1907), the idea of language as a series of signs is found as
early as Aristotle, who defined the human voice as semantikos psophos, ‘significant
sound’, or sounds that make meanings (cited in Agamben 1993: 125). But semiotics is about
more than just meaning. Its basic principle is that language is not simply a naming device, but
rather a differentiated symbolic system. Each word (or sign) applied to an object or idea can be
understood and identified because it is distinguishable from every other word (or sign) that might
have been used (Mitchell 1986: 67–8). It would be unthinkable to exist in a world where a
hammer could also, and simultaneously, be called a toothbrush. And because of familiarity, the
thing we call ‘hammer’ comes to take on what appears to be a quality of ‘hammerless’
and may be treated as though there is something inevitable about its identity and its name
— something that seems to be entirely natural. However, this principle of difference, and hence
the technique of (linguistic) semiotics, can’t easily be applied directly to visual culture. Look at
the photograph of Trafalgar Square in London in Figure 3.3 to make sense of this. The signs in
this photograph don’t take on meanings because of difference, in the strict (semiotic) sense. We
don’t identify the images of buildings as buildings because they are not people or pigeons; rather,
we identify them as buildings in relation to the people and pigeons. We see the buildings, the
people, the pigeons and even the paving as a totality that makes up the image of an urban space,
and thus the whole works together to construct the image we see. We can say, then, that visual
signs work analogically, 64 communication and the visual producing a story that we identify not
in terms of difference—the images and meaning Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM
Page 64 digital on–off/same–difference of the linguistic model—but through the combination of
internal elements, and because of intertextual literacies that confirm for us, on the basis of
experience, what they mean. The linguistic model also fails as a technique for reading the visual
because, as Roland Barthes points out (1977), images both do and don’t have a relationship to
linguistic texts; imagery may be a language, but it doesn’t work like linguistic language, or
possess the sense of grammatical organization and structure (in terms of verbs, subjects,
connectors and so on) that we expect from words. Images don’t have a tense—for instance, if we
look again at the photograph of Trafalgar Square in Figure 3.3, we might say ‘that’s Trafalgar
Square’, or we might—with equal confidence—say ‘that was the Square in 2000’. Past and
present coexist in a still image. As James Elkins argues, pictures (visual images) are not like
language because they are not made of semiotic marks, or signs that relate to each other based on
a structured relation of difference. And so, he writes: ‘Pictures are difficult objects: they resist
interpretation because they resist words’ (Elkins n.d.).

The Picture turns

So, despite the apparent convenience of the semiotic/linguistic approach for the analysis of visual
texts, most theorists—even those who read visual texts in terms of semiotic principles—consider
that they are substantially different communication and the visual 65 Figure 3.3 Trafalgar
Square the pictorial turn Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 65 from
linguistic texts. How, then, can we make sense of images as communication? We could
take themselves rather than simply matter that must be reduced to words. British cultural theorist
Stuart Hall describes this approach as meaning ‘realized in use. Their realization requires, at the
other end of the meaning chain, the cultural practices of looking and interpretation, the subjective
capacities of the viewer to make images signify’ (Hall 1999: 310). This sounds very much like
the linguistic approach—that their meanings are realized because they are translated into
language— but Hall’s point is that the image works not just discursively, or linguistically, but at
the level of the subconscious; it is as concerned with feelings as with sentences and stories, and
involves our whole being, not just our abstract intellectual identity. In This suburban notice
board and Hong Kong electronic streetscape both demonstrate the visual ‘clamour’ that assaults
us daily the previous chapter we described the physiology of seeing, and this is involved here,
because seeing/reading the visual is, as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, a
very physical activity (MerleauPonty 1962: 407). Even at the most basic level of understanding,
we usually must move our bodies to see a visual text: we walk around a sculpture or through a
park; we move closer to and then further away from a painting or building. So visual culture
incorporates texts, the reading of which involves the body and the emotions, and which therefore
are a sensate rather than a purely intellectual means of communication. The pictorial turn is,
obviously, an analytical approach that is semiotic at some levels: it involves identifying signs
and analyzing how they come together to make up a text within its contexts. But it is not simply
semiotic analysis in Saussure’s sense of it being a ‘science of signs’ because this approach to
visual culture demands that the analyst consider considerably more than the arrangement of
signs. Using this approach means accounting for cultural and personal acts of looking and
interpreting, with all the subjective, emotional, and even unconscious responses each of us brings
to this work. Analyzing visual culture under this perspective is thus not simply an intellectual or
abstract task, but one that involves the physical aspects of the material world, and the material
being of the analyst: ‘seeing as being’. This approach to the work of the analyst isn’t confined to
those of us who analyze visual texts; the logic of the pictorial turn is central to any number of
highly intellectual and scientific pursuits. Michael 66 communication and the visual Polanyi
writes that research scientists can practice their ‘art’ Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM
Page 66 because their whole body—using ‘the trained delicacy of eye, ear and touch’—is put to
work to test scientific knowledge against observed events (Polanyi and Prosch 1975: 31).
Doctors and scientists rely on their eyes (and ears, and senses of smell and touch) at least as
much as on conscious reason. So visual culture, as Mirzoeff writes, ‘is not simply the medium of
communication and mass culture. It offers a sensual immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print
media: the very element that makes visual imagery of all kinds distinct from texts’ (1998: 9).

Communicating and Cultural Fields

Whether we remain committed to the linguistic turn or take up the analytical attitude associated
with the pictorial turn, we are acknowledging that visual texts are not just wallpaper but are
always the stuff of communication. However, they do not communicate objectively or in a
vacuum, and any instance of visual (or linguistic) communication is invested in what Pierre
Bourdieu calls the ‘cultural field’ in which the communication is made, and in which it is
analyzed. To consider the aspect of cultural field, we must consider the socio-cultural status of
the fields, groups and individuals producing visual texts, and the ways in which different fields,
different individuals within fields and different ways of negotiating the fields affect the degree to
which the meanings made are seen to be authoritative, or ‘true’. Mark Poster develops this
issue, arguing that we do not see simply ‘what is there’, but that what he terms ‘different visual
regimes’ (Poster 2002: 68)—or different economies of looking andseeing—obtain at
different historical moments and in different contexts. Let’s consider this by looking at the
reproduction of a drawing titled ‘The Straight Parts of Your Body’ (see Figure 3.4). If we
circulated this text across various fields and contexts, the response we would
 most likely receive was that it is ‘sweet’ or
‘quaint’—in other words, that it is naïve,
childish, and not in any way representative of
the real world. The reasons for this are obvious.
Firstly, it looks like a child’s drawing, and
children are usually understood, within Western
culture, as having at best a tenuous relation to
reality. Children aren’t educated and lack access
to the kinds of knowledge (say, science or art)
normally understood to have a special status
when it comes to accessing or reproducing the
real. This is mirrored in the terms used by the
child-artist to categorize the various parts
Figure 3.4 The Straight parts of your bod
of the drawing: ‘straight parts’, ‘finger’,
‘toe’. They belong to an everyday discourse, rather than a scientific or an aesthetic one.
Secondly, the very irregular drafting—the use of circles to represent muscles; the size of the
thumbs in relation to the hand—disqualifies it as emanating from the field of science because it
doesn’t truthfully represent either a human body or its ‘straight parts. The binary adult/child is
one of many distinctions that help to determine whether visual texts have any authority to
represent reality (adults’ may, children don’t). But, as we pointed out above, the extent to which
texts can communicate the ‘real world’ is partly determined by the field from which they—or the
people evaluating them— emerge. If we asked a group of children in a preschool about
the drawing, for instance, they might accept it as realistic. And there are fields where scientific
representations are given the status normally reserved—outside the playground, at least—for a
child’s drawing. We were once involved in a project with academic staff from a university
engineering faculty. Staff from the communication studies department explained the project and
the rationale behind it several times without getting their message across to the Professor of
Engineering, who didn’t seem capable of grasping what to us were straightforward concepts.
Eventually the professor picked up a whiteboard marker and started drawing diagrams, while
being corrected and advised by the communication staff. He drew a series of circles, each with a
label, with lines and arrows indicating the relation between each component. In short, he
produced a predominantly visual description to sum up, for himself, what the project was about,
and what was required to be done, by whom, when and where. The professor explained that he
and his staff nearly always drew up these kinds of diagrams whenever they needed to explain,
understand, or communicate anything of a complex nature. Later some of the
communication staff characterized what had happened as an example of how engineers ‘can’t
think’, but what it actually evinced was the status of the visual within different fields—or what
Mark Poster calls ‘different visual regimes. Within engineering, communicating by means of the
visual is perfectly legitimate, while the communication staff saw it as childish, or socially
incompetent.

visuality and reality

The visual regime that is relevant at a particular moment will determine the extent to which
something will make meanings, and the extent to which those meanings will be taken seriously
in society. But the actual truth value of the meanings is never fully reliable. The general visual
regime which has dominated in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been one
marked by technological sophistication, which means that images may well be less ‘truthful’ or
reliable than in earlier periods (regimes) because they can now be altered quite seamlessly, and
visual hoaxes are easily perpetrated. A very famous hoax is the case of the Cottlingley ‘fairies’,
where two children produced (trick) photographs of fairies, and apparently fooled many adults
who we might think should have known better. This story sparked several novels and films,
including two movies produced in 1997: Charles Sturridge’s Fairy Tale: A True Story and Nick
Willing’s Photographing Fairies (also titled Apparition). This hoax took place nearly a century
ago, when viewers were perhaps less alert to trick photography, but even now, when our culture
is so thoroughly saturated with digitally altered images, we seem no more critical or skeptical
about visual texts.

The airbrushed photographs of celebrities which keep them young, slender, and beautiful
across the decades; the magic of digital remastering which means dead movie stars like
Humphrey Bogart can appear in contemporary advertisements; the hologram of an apple in the
Vancouver Science Museum; the transformation of a pool of metal into a muscled man in the
film Terminator 2: all these are familiar images, and we know something of the technology that
produces them. Yet we will still duck as an arrow flies out of a 3-D screen towards us, or gasp at
the sight of an alien spaceship hanging over a cityscape. They are obvious illusions yet, despite
the many evidence of visual hoaxes, tricks, and misrepresentations, and even though we know
what we see is not necessarily what we get, we still tend to believe what we see.

This belief is based in part on common sense and familiarity. If we look again at the photograph
of Trafalgar Square in Figure 3.3, for example, we can be reassured that we know what is going
on, that the camera has reproduced only ‘what was there’. The familiarity of the scene, and
the everyday quality of the actions and objects and persons represented there, confirm the
authority of the eye to see what is there, and thus confirm our sense of the order of the world. But
we don’t have to resort to visual hoaxes to undermine this confidence—almost any ‘art’
photograph is likely to do so, and to call into question this certainty about what the world looks
like. The photograph ‘Landscape’ reproduced in Figure 3.2 does precisely this. Here, as is
the case with the Trafalgar Square photograph, the lens has seen something and reproduced it
faithfully; however, because a technological device sees in a different way from the
human eye, what it reproduces doesn’t necessarily make sense. This is in fact a very close-up
photograph of the bowl of a hookah (a water-cooled smoking pipe), but the everyday eye cannot
easily get this close to the object, or frame it in such a way. Because of this, it looks unfamiliar to
us, and less like a household object than like a watery scene—a murky pond, perhaps, or a
bubbling mud pool. The shape of the whole object, the framing of its surroundings and the
context of other signs in which it is found and ‘read’ are missing in this perspective and
cannot be recalled. What this suggests is that the eye in fact has little authority, and familiar
ways of seeing cannot be relied upon to deliver up to us the truth of what we see, or the likeness
of what we see to an estab70 communication and the visual lashed reality.

Of course, not every visual image is designed—or even expected— to be involved with the
retrieval of the real, and what is meant by reality changes across time, culture, and
contexts. Religious institutions and fields, for instance, usually insist upon the
transcendental nature of reality—the everyday phenomenal world is considered either a stage on
a journey to a more profound reality (say, heaven) or simply an illusion, a kind of false
consciousness that must be overcome to achieve enlightenment. Science, on the other hand, tends
to understand what is real as that which can be observed, demonstrated and proven, happening in
the ‘real world’, with what ‘everyone thinks’ or with the ‘voice of the people’.

When it comes to visual culture, the term ‘reality’ is usually a shorthand way of saying that
some representation is ‘true to life’. What is meant by ‘true to life’ itself depends itself on culture
and context; it might be possible to argue that both fourteenth-century BCE Egyptian art and
paintings by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (see
www.cacr.caltech.edu/rroy/vermeer/thumb.html) or American artist Norman Rockwell
(see www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/ rockwell_norman.html) are ‘realistic’, but the works
hardly resemble one another. They do, though, resemble something, and in this we can identify
an idea about reality and visual culture that has been central to theories of visuality and culture
across Western history. Its basis is the ancient Greek notion of mimesis, or the imitation (the
reproduction) of reality, which in effect posits that the objects we see are only imitations of an
ideal form. This does not mean that the objects we see are just dreams, or reflections of the
perfection found in the transcendent world. Everyday objects do, of course, have material
integrity, but their role is to recall to us the ethical ideal of which they are the mimesis (or
imitation), and to relay that ideal into the everyday world. In the twentieth-century example of
the ‘fairy photographs’ hoax, the point was to trick people into seeing something that wasn’t
there, but under the principle of mimesis the point is not to trick the eye into thinking it sees
reality, but to persuade viewers that there are ideals to which we can aspire (Melville and
Readings 1995: 8). A beautifully crafted bowl, for instance, might remind us of the ideals of
balance and harmony, and persuade us that
this is a good—or the best—way to be.

Western visual culture comes out of this

ancient Greek tradition, with its emphasis on
Form, and out of the Christian tradition
with its emphasis on the centrality of faith:
‘the evidence of things not seen’.
Consequently, it is concerned to reflect
(somewhat) faithfully the world as being made
up of signs of a greater truth—the heavenly
realm. This was especially evident in visual works and in visual interpretation during the
medieval and Renaissance periods because, in each period, visual culture—both natural and of
human production—was there to reflect, or tell, something about God. The historian Johan
Huizinga wrote: ‘The Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be absurd…if by their
essence they did not react a world beyond them’ (cited in Eco 1986a: 52), and Michel Foucault
refers to the Renaissance as the ‘age of resemblances’ because everything was assumed to
resemble (to echo or imitate) something else. What this picks up on is the mimetic idea that
objects point to a transcendent world. In the Christian era, the important issue was how to
decipher visual objects—and the everyday world—in terms of God’s code. Everything was there
not just to be looked at, not just for its beauty or pleasure, and not just for its utility or everyday
function, but as a reflection of some aspect of God and God’s story— in fact, as semiotician
Umberto Eco writes: ‘The Medieval inhabited a world filled with references, reminders and
overtones of Divinity, manifestations of God in things’ (Eco 1986a: 53). White was not just 72
communication and the visual a tone, but a symbol of light and goodness, as black was a symbol
Figure 3.6 Detail from ‘The Garden of Earthy Delights’ (c. 1504), one of Hieronymus
Bosch’s most visually challenging religious allegories. Everything one could look at had its
obvious meaning and function (a candle is a means of illumination) but also had its allegorical
meaning and function (a burning candle could symbolize eternity or divine salvation; a guttering
candle could remind us of the transitory nature of life).

Reading the Real

The medieval were not alone in their tendency to read visual objects as having meanings or
seeing in them something more than their obvious or functional identity. Aristotle had prefigured
something of this, writing in his Poetics (350 BCE) that:

the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find
themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you happen
not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such,
but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.

Let’s put these ideas to work now by ‘reading’ the photograph shown in Figure 3.7. This is a
very familiar image in our culture and provides many examples of what Aristotle called
‘learning’, ‘inferring’ and ‘identifying’; it also has a kind of mimetic role, reflecting something
of an ideal, and it can be read as a kind of allegory.
 How can we bring these ideas together? Firstly, a wedding photograph is a point of
enjoyment, as Aristotle would term it, because it provides pleasure for those involved and
their friends and relations: the pleasure of ‘Ah, that is he (or she)’ because it memorializes
the couple and the day. For us, who ‘happen not to have seen the original’ (since this is a
photograph found in a second-hand shop), it also offers a pleasure: observing the clothes,
the bodily arrangement within the party, the looks on their faces—even the pleasure of
guessing who is related to whom and in what context. It therefore produces a satisfying
story. It is certainly a realist image, because it represents an actual historical moment and (we
assume, based on what we know of the genre) the people reflected in it would easily be
recognized by those who know them—it actually looks like the original that is the couple,
their family, and the moment of their wedding. But it is also unreal, or hyperreal, because
even highly realistic works—mimetic works—are still not the thing itself, but only resemble
the thing. Besides, few people look in everyday life as they do in their wedding photograph; the
image is an ideal representation of them at their best and most polished. The combination of
real and not-real shows how the photograph works mimetically, or rhetorically, by drawing
attention away from the actual humdrum, everyday identity of the people shown there, and
instead reflecting an ideal—marriage, fidelity, and love. Aristotle insisted that the pleasure of
realist works is in ‘learning’, ‘inferring’ and ‘identifying’, and we can interpret the work,
following Erwin Panofsky’s model, by deciphering it across three interpretative strata: its
material structure; the factual meanings of the text and its signs; and specifics of its context. In
the case of this wedding photograph, the first stratum is easily deciphered: we can perceive
an arrangement of lines and light in differently shaded and shaped blocks, and in particular
configurations and spatial orientations. The second stratum is simply a reading of the
conventional subject matter, in terms of recognizing the pure forms as particular objects with a
social meaning (Panofsky 1955: 54). In this instance, we can identify the bride and her
bridesmaids, the groom and his groomsmen, the drapes, the carpet and so on. We can also
read the motifs—flowers, lace, bodily postures—and identify in them something of the genres
and narratives they convey. This is also a relatively 74 communication and the visual simple
process of deciphering, because it doesn’t require any literacy Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05
11:38 AM Page 74 cites beyond everyday knowledge. We can easily define the blobs and
lines as people, furniture, and flowers because we are familiar with people, furniture, and
flowers; and we can define the motifs and gestures because weddings and wedding
photographs are very familiar genres in Western culture and convey a very familiar story—
being in love, making a commitment, gathering with friends and family, wearing your best
clothes, and so on. The first two strata, then, are interpreted through the things we already
know. Neither requires any literacy beyond the everyday knowledge that comes from the
viewer’s own history (habitus). But this does not complete the interpretation of a visual image,
either from Aristotle’s point of view (that we must learn), from the allegorical Christian
view (that we must decipher the divine code in all things), or from a contemporary cultural
perspective which insists that what we see is not necessarily what we get, and therefore we need
to analyze, and not just identify, what we see. Panofsky writes: ‘To understand this . . . I
must not only be familiar with the practical world of objects and events, but also with the
more-than-practical world of customs and cultural traditions peculiar to a certain
civilization’ (1955: 52). He goes on to explain it more particularly as an interpretative
attitude determined ‘by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic
attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—qualified by one
personality and condensed into one work’ (Panofsky 1955: 55). The nineteenth-century French
poet Baudelaire had already articulated this, in writing about the mimetic function of
fashion plates from the 1790s:

The Reality Function

Photographs and other communication technologies may give us very recognizable images but,
as we have argued, they are no more reliable at retrieving reality than any other medium.
Besides, what we count as real or realist depends on the context in which we are looking, and
what we expect from it. The British cartoonist Norman Thelwell, for instance, is famous for his
many drawings of ponies: no one could ever see a pony that looked like one of Thelwell’s
drawings, but at the same time his drawings are immediately and del ightfully recognizable as
ponies. They have a particular ‘reality function’, or ‘truth-to-reality’, that is based on the field
(cartooning), the context (entertaining drawings), the narratives (children and their ponies) and
the ideological framework (the endless competition of social life).

So truth-to-reality, transparent communication, tradition or utility are not the only ways to
understand visual representation. For well over a century now, many practitioners have
deliberately rejected the idea that they are producing mimetic works, or realistic images of the
world out there. Think of advertisers with their jingles, dancing chickens and whiter-than-white
laundry; think of school children learning to manipulate photographs so they no longer represent
their image; think too of filmmakers, and their rejection of the early twentieth-century
conventions of plot and narrative. A movie like Three Kings, for instance, unabashedly shows
the impossible in the form of the ‘bullet cam’ shot where, when George Clooney, who plays
Special Forces Captain Archie Gates, is explaining to his subordinates why one should endeavor
not to be shot, the camera follows an imaginary bullet through the air and into the abdomen of
one of his fellow soldiers, and then back out again. Like Impressionist paintings which weren’t
so much concerned with the thing represented as with the form of representation—how light was
rendered, how to explore feelings in paint—or Cubist works, 76 communication and the visual
which attempted to show all dimensions of an object at one moment, the reality function Reading
the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 76 contemporary forms of visual representation take
issue with the notion that there is just one right way of seeing and being.

Many, in fact, have gone even further away from resemblance, and from ways of alluding to the
‘real’ world. Think of the abstraction of American minimalism in the middle of the twentieth
century when a work might be only white paint on a white canvas—Robert Rauschenberg’s
‘White Painting’ series (1951), for instance—and in fact constitute a refusal to represent the
world at all. From a different approach, but with a similar attitude, much contemporary art is
almost purely self-referential (referring only to the art world). One example is the work of
installation artist Ben Vattier who produced a work titled ‘J’ai pas peur de Marcel’ (‘I’m not
afraid of Marcel’, 1994–96). It is a large knife grinder, exhibited with the title and a panel
incorporating a quote from Marcel Duchamp. The work has virtually no ‘artistic’ signs apart
from the fact that it is produced by a known artist, is exhibited in a recognized art museum, and
of course refers to Marcel Duchamp’s famous installation of a urinal, ‘Fountain’ (1917).
Whether artists are refusing to represent reality— as in the case of abstract minimalism—or
representing something that is reality only to a tiny audience—as with Valtier’s work—what we
have is, like Rene Magritte’s famous ‘This is Not a Pipe’ (www.uwrf.edu/history/prints/magritte-
pipe.html), artists refusing to affirm or communicate anything at all.

Given this context, and the fact that we can’t rely on the evidence or the authority of our eyes to
tell us the truth of what we are seeing, it can be argued that what reality means in visual culture
is simply a means of communication (‘it’s real, or like reality, because it’s telling us something
true’). Whether a visual image really looks like the original or not, it has a sort of ritual function
in telling its viewers something about itself, and about society in relation to itself. Look, for
example, at the photograph in Figure 3.8a, an arrangement of kiln goddesses modelled on the
very famous statue of the Venus of Willendorf (Figure 3.8b), believed to be 25,000 years old.

That Venus, with her vast breasts and belly, and her heavy thighs, does not in any respect call up
contemporary ideals of female beauty. The statue does, however, represent the notion of fertility,
and for contemporary audiences it also summons up the powerful ideas of magic and religion. In
the arrangement shown here, the potter is not simply reiterating the ideas communicated by the
ancient craftspeople. (After all, we can’t know for certain what they were communicating in their
work—the past, as novelist L.P. Hartley pointed out, is a foreign country: ‘they do things
differently there’.) But communication and the visual 77 Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38
AM Page 77 because she is making such a deliberate reference to the early forms, it is worth
paying attention to what is being communicated. At the basic level, we could argue, she is
simply following a common practice in her field: potters often make small objects out of scraps
of clay to tuck in with a firing. But many women potters, especially in the 1970s and 1980s,
deliberately made them in the form of those ancient goddesses, in response firstly to their own
culture (reflecting second wave feminism and a particular perspective on women’s power) and
then to an idea of history, or a matriarchal prehistory. As copies of an ancient visual text, the kiln
goddesses privilege fecundity and matriarchy; as late twentieth-century texts, they interrogate
contemporary ideals of female beauty and the body fascism of fashion; and as objects associated
with the craft of pottery, they respond to internal craft traditions, and remind practitioners of the
ancient magic of the kiln.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have outlined the relationship, in visual culture, between representations of
reality and means of communication. But, as Stuart Hall writes:

The symbolic power of the image to signify is in no sense restricted to the conscious level and cannot
always easily be expressed in words. In fact, this may be one of the ways in which the so-called power
of the image differs from that of the linguistic sign. What is often said about the ‘power of the image’
is indeed that its impact is immediate and powerful even when its precise meaning remains, as it were,
vague, suspended—numinous. (Hall 1999: 311)
Chapter 4

Visual narratives
Introduction

In the This chapter we will take up the question of how visual narratives may be structured, and
discuss the ways in which stories can be
told in this ‘suspended’ and ‘numinous’ medium, and the extent to
which this medium may communicate more than unconscious or
subconscious impressions.

the degree to which pictures—visual culture—can communicate or present not just forms, but
stories too. We have written in earlier chapters about ‘reading’ visual texts, and this expression
alludes to the notion that pictures, images and visual objects more generally are not just to be
looked at, but contain a story, or a body of information, which we can access as we might access
the content of a written text. Several schools of visual art are identified as producers of narratives
(church paintings, Pre-Raphaelites, social realism), indicating the possibility of a single image
containing a story, but there is very little in the literature to indicate what is meant by ‘narrative
picture’, or how such an object relates to what we know of narrative more generally.

Specific Objectives
At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
-know the meaning of Visual Narratives
-understand the relationship between narratives and spaces applies to the visual world
and its texts
-apply the technique of Visual texts.

Duration
Chapter 1: Reading the Visual = 3 hours
(2 hours discussion;
1 hour assessment)

Lesson Proper

the relationship between narratives and spaces applies to the visual world and its texts
because, while most theorists agree that visual texts rarely provide a clear narrative, they
certainly work as ‘metaphorai’—providing vehicles that enable viewers to ‘go somewhere else’,
or to craft a story. Where viewers take such a story is not entirely free, though: just as buses and
trains move along routes, so too our reading of any visual text is limited by what is in the text, by
the context in which we come across it, and by what we expect to find there based on our
understanding of what kind of text it is and what kinds of stories are associated with it. In
Chapter 1 we discussed these issues in terms of intertexts and genres, and we will develop these
here with reference to how we read the narratives of visual texts.
what is a narrative?

First, let’s turn to the question of narrative which, at its simplest, means ‘story’. But of
course, it is more complex than this: the word comes from the Latin narrare, ‘to relate’, so it
denotes both what is told and the process of the telling (Toolan 1988: 1). A whole discipline
exists to describe and analyze narrative, its practices, its various elements and how they come
together to produce a coherent story. Narratology, or the study of narrative, begins with the
ancients, and with works such as Aristotle’s Poetics. More recently, it has been associated with
structuralists like Gerard Genette and Roland Barthes’ early writings, Marxists like Bertold
Brecht and Georg Lukacs and poststructuralists like the later Barthes or Terry Eagleton, among
others.
Each ‘school’ has a different orientation. Structuralist accounts start from the premise
that people reproduce the objective structures of their culture, and articulate these through all
their communication—including, of course, the stories they tell, write or paint. We can find out
about a society, the logic goes, by studying its social institutions and systems, and the authorized
version of the way things are and how they are (or should be) done. Poststructuralists argue that
this explanation is inadequate because it fails to address all the non82 visual narratives
authorized ways in which things exist and are done, and because it what is a narrative? Reading
the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 82 can’t account for the degree to which, in any society,
other stories and practices challenge the authorized account. And Marxists are more concerned
with the economic conditions that generate stories, and the power relations that mean some
stories will be authorized and allowed to circulate while others will be marginalized or silenced.
But whether structuralist, poststructuralist or Marxist, most narrative theorists agree that
the first, and central, issue about narrative is that stories always operate within a social context.
The way we organize the content of a narrative, what elements it must have, who reads it, where
it is read and what it seems to be saying are all determined by its cultural context. British
comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore pick up on this in a sketch, set in London’s National
Gallery, where they try to understand the famous da Vinci cartoon that is in the gallery’s
collection. Pete, an out-and-out art illiterate who doesn’t know a cartoon (a preparatory drawing)
from a cartoon (a comic), complains about it: ‘Not much of a joke as far as I’m concerned, Dud.’
But Dud, who here shows an unexpected grasp of contemporary theory, explains the cartoon
along the following lines: ‘I bet when that da Vinci cartoon first came out, people were killing
themselves laughing, Pete. It’s a different culture, you see. It’s Italian. We don’t understand it.’
Much as Pete and Dud don’t find the cartoon funny because (as they understand the idea of
cartoons) it’s not their culture, we cannot read the stories of ancient Assyria, or the cave
paintings of Lascaux, with any real assurance that we know precisely what they mean, why they
were made and for whom, and what effects they had on their readers, because those cultures (we
assume) are so foreign from ours in terms of organization, identity and values. We can only be
confident about the effects such works have on us now, and what those effects say about how
contemporary culture is organize.

Plot and Narrative

The theoretical schools or positions to which we referred also agree on the basic
elements of story. Briefly, it must have a plot (what happened and why), a narrator (the point of
view from which it is told), characters who participate in the story (human or otherwise), events
(everything in the story that happens to or because of the characters), the time and place in which
those events take place, and the causal relations which link the events together. Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan (1983) explains this by citing the following limerick:
There was a young lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger

This, in her account, satisfies all the criteria of narrative. It has a plot (young woman
rides tiger, is eaten); it has a narrator, or narrative viewpoint (the position from which the story is
told); it has characters (the woman and the tiger), events (riding, eating), time (the duration from
when she leaves, smiling, to when the tiger comes back alone) and place (within the narrator’s
view, and somewhere off stage); and it has causality (she smiles because she rides; the tiger
smiles because it has been fed). Of course, it must be pointed out that this way of reading the
limerick as a story is not entirely ‘given to us’: we infer it, using our cultural literacy. For
instance, at no stage in the limerick is it stated that the tiger ate the woman. We can say,
however, that since the woman is inside the tiger, and the tiger is smiling, there is a strong
narrative inflection which leads us to this conclusion. In this way, it is like the rhetorical figure
of the enthymeme, where the (absent) logical conclusion is inferred from the parts of a statement.
To show the difference between a strongly inflected narrative and something which
merely has narrative potential, Rimmon-Kenan cites that old Valentine’s Day standby:

Roses are red

Violets are blue
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.

This too has a narrator—the voice complimenting the loved one; it has a character—the
sweet ‘you’; but it lacks plot, time, place, and causal relations. Readers can, no doubt, extract a
narrative from it—maybe the traditional boy-meets-girl romance; maybe a ‘forbidden love’
story; maybe a lullaby for a baby; maybe a cynical parody of the romance narrative. But its story
can’t be secured or pinned down—there are as many directions possible from this raw material
as there are readers willing to invest the time to construct their own stories from it. For Rimmon-
Kenan, then, as for most narrative theorists, any text is arguably a form of narrative in that it tells
someone about something or someone, but only some will be genuine narrative.
The photograph shown in Figure 4.1 demonstrates this: it has narrative potential and a
number of narrative features, particularly character (the young man in the shot) and point of view
(from which the photograph was taken, and from which we view it). It implies event, in that he
seems to be dressed for a graduation ceremony. This in turn implies other causally related events
—study at university before the photo, a professional life afterwards. As such, it also implies
time: before, during and after the event. And, given the hairstyle, clothing, posture, and facial
expression of the sitter, it seems to have a historical location—we could say that it was probably
late Victorian or Edwardian because of the severity and stiffness of the pose, and the formality of
dress for such a young man. But, without more information in the form of an extended caption or
a series of related photographs, we can’t know this for sure; we can only guess at the story. It
points us in a particular direction, or series of directions, but it can’t ‘tell’ in the way a genuine
narrative would, because it is a collection of signs which readers are relatively free to organize
into their own story. For many theorists, this doesn’t constitute genuine narrative because a story
doesn’t make itself or simply exist on a page or in a frame. It has to be crafted, and must comply
with particular generic formulae, patterns or design ‘tools. Among these tools are the elements
we have already mentioned—plot, character, time, event, and so on.

Time and Narrative

Theorists of narrative argue that one of the most important design tools is time. Indeed,
for Arthur Asa Berger, ‘narratives, in the simplest sense, are stories that take place in time’
(1997: 6)—although it is difficult to think of a story that doesn’t take place in time. And
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan agrees that ‘time itself is indispensable to both story and text. To
eliminate it (if this were possible) would be to eliminate all narrative fiction.’ (1983: 58) This
makes sense when considering a verbal narrative, where the words are arranged in a linear
fashion and what is being told is a sequence of events. Therefore, however the writer handles
visual narratives 85 Figure 4.1 Will Cronwright, c. 1920 time and narrative Reading the Visual
Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 85 the issue of time, we are expected to read it in a linear fashion,
to understand the time scale within which those events occur and to allow the time of the telling
to map out the spatial domain of the story world.
Or moving. Here the temporal order of events can be identified by the arrangement of
icons within the frame and the juxtaposition of one frame to another. Comic strips in Western
countries, for instance, are produced to be read from left to right, and from top to bottom, just as
we read printed words; and the events can be organised and disclosed, much as novelist might
control a narrative. But it is not so easy when we come to individual visual texts. Except for
special examples, like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2’ (1912; thumbnail
online at www.philamuseum.org/collections/ modern_contemporary), where the figure is
represented in a kind of arrested slow motion, reiterated over and over as it moves down the
stairs, it is very difficult to show time unfolding within a single frame. Instead, what we get tends
to be a plethora of discontinuous signs from which we must assume patterns and meanings, and
not the structured organisation of signs we find in a verbal narrative. In a literary work, the
events are narrated in a particular set order; in a pictorial work, by contrast, you can look in any
order. W.T.J. Mitchell points out, in this regard, that ‘literature is an art of time, painting is an art
of space’ (Mitchell 1986: 95), because book audiences are relatively static observers, reading
over a period of time about the passage of time, but image audiences are active observers,
walking around a static object. And, while verbal narratives are about what happened, when and
to whom, in visual texts we are more likely to ask the question ‘What is it?’ or ‘Who is it?’
We discussed the ways in which photographs have an uncertain relation to time in
Chapter 3. I can look at a photograph of myself, for instance, and say both ‘That’s me’ and ‘That
was me, back then’. Single-frame texts can’t secure time in the way a verbal narrative does. Nor
can they manipulate time as verbal narratives do, imposing on the past a certain order, flashing
back and forward, narrating from the beginning to the end, or from the end to the beginning, or
any combination of these. And they cannot control the order in which events are disclosed, as
written texts do, because unless we are looking at a sequence of images—a graphic novel, or a
film, a triptych or diptych, or the individual objects in an installation or exhibition— we can look
at the various signs within the frame in pretty much any 86 visual narratives order, and for
virtually any length of time. Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 86 Time, in short,
cannot be ‘told’ in visual texts or even in narrative pictures; we can only infer it from the
structure of the visual text, and the arrangement of its parts (Mitchell 1986: 100). We get some
sense of the passage of time from the arrangement of bodies and objects in juxtaposition, and
from the way their movement is frozen in the instance of representation, because whatever
position a body is in is a fragment of a larger movement, before and after its freezing. This is
heightened using line: a straight line between two points, or a jagged line with acute angles,
conveys the impression of movement and speed, because the eye moves quickly across the scene.
Gentle, curved, and easy lines convey a slower, more languid space and scene because the eye
moves more lazily across them. Lines in a drawing, then, contain time and movement. The
Woomera protest photograph shown in Figure 4.2 combines these two effects, including straight,
hard lines and slow curves, in a way that arrests the passage of the eye. The urgency of the
verticals (sticks and posts) along with the flatness of sky and ground compels rapid and jagged
movement; but the lazy shadows and the regular curves of the horses’ quarters slow the eye
down, encouraging it to linger. Together, this contradictory effect evokes not the passage of time,
but a moment of watchfulness—of waiting for the next thing to happen.

Narrative, Genre and Intertext

Other ‘tools’ that are perhaps more important than time and event in pinning down narrative and
directing the readers of a text are two related principles: genre and intertextuality, which we
raised in earlier chapters. Visual texts, like any texts, do not constitute a pure field—that is, we
don’t come to them innocently, but always read them in terms of all the other things we know
and have seen, and with which we are familiar. This means that no text is entirely free-floating,
or entirely subject to the whim and imagination of its viewer to make meanings or tell stories.
Barthes writes: ‘The variation in readings is not, however, anarchic; it depends on the different
kinds of knowledge—practical, national, cultural, aesthetic—invested in the image.’ (Barthes
1977: 46). So even a text that doesn’t obviously have an organised narrative structure will place
constraints on its viewers—in Figure 4.1, for instance, we would be hard pressed to say that the
young man is about to head off to war; the absence of a military uniform 90 visual narratives
precludes that.
What is it that limits the number of stories even so sparse a text can produce? Firstly, of
course, the possibilities are limited by the actual content—there are no guns in this photograph.
But beyond that, intertextuality and genre ensure that only certain stories can be read into visual
texts by readers who share a similar context, background, and history. Intertextuality, as we
discussed in Chapter 1, refers to the way in which we make sense of texts based on other texts
with which we are familiar. Because no social practice can operate in isolation from its social
context, any spoken, written, or visual text will either connote or cite other texts and, by recalling
these known stories, they will propel our reading in a particular direction. Our knowledge of
them may be tacit, a familiarity—most people in Western society have seen old portrait
photographs, so we will draw on others we have seen and perhaps know about (pictures of our
own grandfathers) to make a story from this instance of the text. In other cases, we may only ‘get
it’ because we already possess literacy in the form or narrative being cited. The painting ‘After
Magritte’, shown in Figure 5.1 in Chapter 5, demands that readers be familiar with Magritte’s
work. The drawing ‘Bonnie’s Eyes’ shown in Figure 5.4, also in Chapter 5, requires that we are
able to make the connection to the American gangsters Bonnie and Clyde; and it would help to
know that the artist was working on a series of drawings of criminals and politicians if we really
wanted to understand what story it is telling. In fact, as we argued earlier, we always make sense
of texts based on our intertextual knowledge, and without relevant literacies we will not be able
to read a text effectively. Political cartoons are an example of this: they don’t make much sense
30 years later because most of us have either forgotten the people and events concerned, or never
knew them.
Genre is related to this because it is a principle of classification based on already-known
stories, conventions, characters, and other elements. Whenever we read a text as belonging to a
particular genre, we are drawing on intertextual knowledges: we are classifying it according to
its likeness to other texts with which we are familiar. The image shown in Figure 4.4, for
instance, can easily be categorized into a specific genre that draws on several other genres, and
we can read because of the many intertextual references and hints it offers.
Firstly, we know it is an invitation because it states as much in the top caption. It is
presumably a twenty-first birthday party invitation, since the Catch 22 title has been altered to
read Catch 21, and the simple drawing is an intertextual reference to early childhood. In Western
culture, a twenty-first birthday is the transition point from childhood to adulthood, which doubles
the signification indicated in the captions ‘invited’ and ‘Catch 21’. The text also tells us more
about the person than just the age: we get the gender from the title (‘Paul’), and we get a sense of
his interests in the various intertextual references to movies. One is its likeness to the movie
poster genre: the ‘widescreen’ claim at the top and the large title overlaid on to the visual.
Another is the (intertextual) Catch 22 reference, which is an important text for film buffs; a
further indication is found in the credits at the base of the text, which include the eponymous
hero and— we can guess from the family name—his parents. Tacit knowledge—familiarity with
the main genre and the sub-genres—conveys both humor and a sense of the person being
promoted in the invitation; literacy—direct knowledge of the text and its context—will confirm
the accuracy of the reading and the story that is implied in the invitation
Genre thus works together with intertextuality to secure the meaning of a text. But this is
not all it does or means. There are several definitions for genre. Etymologically, it simply means
a particular type or kind of text, from the Latin word genus, or ‘kind’. It is used most as a kind of
organizational device, a way of shelving books and arranging art galleries by putting like with
like. It is also a very ancient taxonomical practice: the earliest writings on narrative classify texts
into poetry, prose, and drama; these are again subdivided into, say, tragedy and comedy; and in
contemporary hierarchies of genre further still into ‘drama’, ‘romance’, ‘horror’, ‘art house’,
‘self-help’ and so on, to an almost infinite number of categories. This provides a practical
dimension: with a working knowledge of genre— 92 visual narratives or kind—we can navigate
video hire stores and bookshops, fairly Figure 4.4 Invitation Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05
11:38 AM Page 92 confident we’ll know what sort of text we’re renting or buying. It also means
that the principle of genre is one not just of classification and nomination, but also of
interactions. Understanding generic order means we can quickly and efficiently make sense of
any text, or any communication exchange, based on its features.
The idea of genre includes not only what type a text might be, but also the process by
which it is constructed, and the process by which readers make sense of it (Brent 1994: 2). When
we come to a text, we assume a certain frame of mind based on our understanding of the genre to
which it belongs and the expectations associated with that genre (‘now I’m ready to be scared’;
‘now I expect to be moved emotionally’; ‘now I’m going to be informed’), which means we are
effectively required to read the work in a particular way. This is very evident in traditional art
museums, where most people assume a kind of reverential silence in the presence of the works
on display; even if they are silly or comic, the fact that they have been classified as capital-A Art
means people approach them with respect. But similar skill and technique applied to, say, an
advertising image doesn’t generate respect, because it belongs to a different genre and is likely to
be found in a different context.

Everyday life as Narrative

We noted above that every text belongs within a genre—there cannot be a text without
genre. In a similar vein, we can say that narrative pervades all of life—there cannot be life
without narrative. This is not because everyone’s life is necessarily structured like a narrative, as
96 visual narratives we defined it above (narrator, character, plot, event, time, place, everyday
life as narrative Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 96 causality). Indeed, for many
of us, no plot is ever evident: causal connections between events may be very fuzzy, and there
will rarely be the clarity and organization we expect of narrative. Arthur Asa Berger (1997) goes
even further, insisting that life is nothing like narrative because it is all middle, generally diffuse,
and basically eventless. But, as Michel de Certeau points out, life is like narrative because the
principle of narrative shapes our world:

Captured by the radio as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day
long through the forest of narrativities from journalism, advertising,
and television, narrativities that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed,
to slip a few final messages under the portal of sleep . . . these stories
have a providential and predestinating function: they organize in
advance our work, our celebrations and even our dreams.
(Certeau 1984: 84)

That is to say, narrative is there not because it is inherent in life, but because it envelops us and
structures our practice, or our experience of practice. As social creatures, we think in story—in
time, character, event, and causality—and we make sense of our own lives, as well as our
connections to other people and to institutions, in terms of the narratives we craft. Narrative is a
site of interaction (an active verb) rather than a static object (noun), and thus social values will
always be inscribed in narratives.
But to what extent is it true to say that narratives will always be present and clear in
visual texts? After all, as we have noted, there are quite strict criteria for narrative, as opposed to
general narrative potential, or the social narrativity that Certeau describes. Roland Barthes (1977)
writes that images do and don’t have a relationship to linguistic texts; imagery is a language, but
it doesn’t work like linguistic language. Similarly, visual texts do and don’t work according to
the principles of narrative. But, on the other hand, any sort of language is about performance and
the construction of images because it addresses an audience, uses devices of framing, pointing,
and showing, and relies on metaphors and figures—so much so that the language in a text can be
termed iconic rather than transparently communicative (Maclean 1988: 16). And, as any student
of creative writing knows, ‘good writing’ is mimetic (it ‘shows’) and not diegetic (that is, it
doesn’t ‘tell’). So, we can say that there is a visual or iconic quality to spoken and written
language, much as there is the potential for communication and narrative within any visual text.
 However, many theorists argue that, in the absence of words or other interpretative signs,
it is very difficult to pin down a story; strictly speaking, narratives are not built into, or
accessible within, visual texts as they are in verbal texts. Mark Twain, for instance, wrote after
looking at the Guido Reni painting of Beatrice Cenci, shown in Figure 4.5:

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in
a historical painting. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the
celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day Before Her Execution’. It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the
picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, ‘Young Girl with Hay Fever; Young Girl with Her Head in a
Bag’. (cited Mitchell 1986: 40)

An image may indeed ‘tell’, but it tells without the clarity

provided by words, and without the principles of narrative
organisation that are readily possible in verbal language. If
a picture paints a thousand words, it is also true to say that
it may be read in a thousand ways, and tell myriad stories,
because pictures are always open to personal
interpretation, and relatively inaccessible to any who lack
very specific literacies. James Elkins writes of visual texts
that their excessive ambiguity is based on the fact that they
are made up of what he terms ‘nonSemitic marks—that is,
they aren’t comprised of linguistic or otherwise systematic
or oppositional signs’ (Elkins 2002). Consequently, he
writes, they ‘resist interpretation’. Gombrich takes a
similar position, writing: ‘Interpretation on the part of the
Figure 4.5 A portrait by Guido image maker must always be matched by the interpretation
Reni reputed to be of the of the viewer. No image tells its own story’ (Gombrich
sixteenth-century Roman
noblewoman Beatrice Cenci. The
1996: 48). And Roland Barthes, the interpreter of visual
provenance of the painting has texts, insists that ‘all images are polysemous; they imply,
always been disputed. under their signifiers, a “floating chain” of signified, the
reader able to choose some and ignore others’ (Barthes
1977: 39).

Images into text

The visual texts that most obviously rely on verbal language—outside of films and videos, that is
—are comic strips and graphic novels, which can be defined as ‘open ended dramatic narrative
about a recurring set of characters, told in a series of drawings, often including dialogue in
balloons and a narrative text’ (Inge 1990: xi). They are very old forms: we could identify among
their antecedents the heavily annotated ancient Egyptian art works; those medieval art works that
incorporated speech balloons; and of course, the early twentieth-century cartoons and comics.
The codes and conventions of the form were finally formalized by the twentieth century, with
many of their features standardized: the arrangement of panels to govern the pattern of reading;
different shaped balloons for speech and thought, conventions of movement; narratorial
comment; descriptive captions; facial expressions; and onomatapoeia (Kannenberg 1996/2001).
The graphic story shown in Figure 4.6 illustrates most of these conventions. It begins
with a cinematographic long shot—an establishing shot—from above the city, then immediately
zooms in to street level where someone—given the cape, mask and muscles, presumably a
superhero—is speeding into the frame. The title ‘Blood in the Gutter’ picks up on the ‘mean
streets’ notion associ100 visual narratives ated with the detective genre (so we assume he is
trying to solve a image into text Reading the Visual Pages 6/1/05 11:38 AM Page 100 problem
and restore order), and the subtitle ‘The case of the missing information’ substantiates the
detective genre, but in a parodic sense. Juxtaposing a down-and-dirty American detective sub-
genre with a Miss Marple or Nancy Drew ‘the case of . . .’ can only be intending to make fun of
the whole genre. And the empty speech bubbles and narratorial boxes reiterate this—little or
nothing is being said, perhaps because it has all been said before, so often, in one formulaic text
after another (and hence, perhaps, we see Sara and Butch, ‘their minds rotted away by static
consumption of cultural texts’).
Let’s look at the connection between the words and pictures in this strip to identify how
its effects are produced. The drawing is very much in genre for a superhero/thriller/action
narrative. Each frame replicates the zooms, jump cuts and racking shots of film, and propels the
narrative by moving us, the viewers, through the space and events. Every line seems committed
to action and constant movement: the hero races, leaps, dives or stands in alert readiness; even
when the door is open, he can’t just walk in, because that’s not what heroes do. The urgency of
the story is signaled partly by the hero’s rapid movement and taut posture, and also by the sharp
perspective in many frames—for instance, the floorboards, and the tiles that run quickly to the
vanishing point, force our eyes to move quickly as well. Other conventions are obeyed too: lines
indicating the direction of movement show in each frame where he has come from, where he is
headed, and how rapidly. Frustration is shown in lines darting from his forehead, and the irritated
sonophoretic tap (‘CLICK!’) of his foot on the floor. And when he dives through the doorway,
the energy of his movement is signaled by the ‘KA-BLAM!’ that accompanies the sketch, as a
narrative sound effect. The story being told, though, as the title and subtitle suggest, is parodic—
making fun of both the genre of detective/superhero graphic forms, and of academic
doublespeak.
It is, as are visual narratives generally, very economical in its gestures and icons; with a
few lines, it conjures up a whole set, and condenses—and thus intensifies—information and
action. It is also, as any still image must be, committed to representing only fragments of
movement or characterization, rather than the more nuanced forms possible in verbal texts. But it
is still able to point to quite sophisticated issues of story and character. In this story, the hero is
the academic who is skilled in textual analysis; his friends, Adorno-esque cultural dupes, have
been vampirised by the texts they consume. It suggests that pens are indeed mightier than
swords, and that a
Figure 4.6 Blood in the Gutter
 Barthesian active reader, trained to decode and control texts, is the only one safe enough
(muscled, caped and masked enough) to read them.

Conclusion

Ernst Gombrich writes that: ‘There must be a great difference between a painting that illustrates
a known story and another that wishes to tell a story’ (1982: 101). This suggests that reading a
visual narrative often effectively involves writing it. Pictures, for the most part, depict things or
illustrate known stories, but don’t necessarily narrativise them. In fact, with the passage of time
in the Western tradition, narrative has increasingly retreated from the visual text, starting with
the Renaissance when the development of linear perspective shifted the focus of the viewer from
the story being depicted to the illusion of reality of three-dimensional space. And now, in the
modern era, narrative has pretty much retreated from art, though it is present in graphic novels,
films, television programs and other visual genres that are still committed to story.
The change, Martin Jay suggests (1993: 51), is based on more general changes in social
understandings and values. In the medieval period, for instance, the world was seen as ‘the book
of nature’—there as an intelligible object, available to be read and containing God’s order; by the
Enlightenment it was an object of (‘scientific’) observation, without a narrative or meaning
outside its functionality. By the twentieth century, with the decline in certainty about any
meaning or possibility of order, visual art had turned to complete abstraction: a story-less image.
While there is, as we have seen, considerable doubt as to the capability of images to
convey narrative in its strict sense, visual images have regularly had a narrative component (as
seen in cave paintings, bas-reliefs, mosaics, Stations of the Cross, diptych and triptych artworks).
Though, as Rosalind Krauss (1992) points out, visual texts are highly multiple and layered, and
rarely transparent stories, there is always some structural principle, some structuring order, to
reduce the anarchy of polysemy. Visual works may not easily tell stories, but they have huge
narrative potential and great expressive power: the ability to convey emotions, ideas, and
attitudes; and to direct readers to particular narratives. In the next few chapters, we develop this
discussion by moving to discuss three of the main ‘narratives’ of our time: visual art, the
normalizing of the visual domain, and the relationship between seeing and capitalism.