Sometimes our ways of looking at things become so familiar to us that we miss the bigger picture.
In class, we discussed a content analysis we had started earlier in the week, which evaluates the impact of images on foreign policy in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.
As a way of explaining the nature of content categories, I went Online to compare pictures on two Websites. The first Website selected was Al Jazeera and the second was Fox News. Both sites offer photo slideshows of the conflict and gave us a chance to deliberate about content categories.
Some of the categories we developed included civilians, soldiers, structural damage, location, focal length, and other dimensions.
What we discovered in the process of physically counting the size, placement, location, and content of each image from the newspapers was that many of our early assumptions and perceptions were false. But, more about that later.
I am fascinated with how we might make meanings from the two images above.
The top picture from the Al Jazeera Website shows an Israeli tank on the move with a stop sign in the foreground. The bottom image, from Fox News, shows a bombed out building in Beirut with another stop sign in the foreground.
What meanings could be given to having stop signs foregrounding the primary signifiers – the tank or the buildings? Could the stop signs merely be convenient visual elements to help make the pictures more aesthetic or could we read a bit of the photographer's personal opinion in the frame? If the latter is true, are there any implications in understanding photographic veracity?
First and foremost, there are many possible readings to any picture.
If we take the commonsense viewpoint the content in these two frames are simply what they represent – A tank approaching an intersection with a stop sign or a stop sign in an urban center with rubble in the background.
From the commonsense viewpoint we rely on the literal meaning of what is signified, and we do not read any more into the frame than what it tells us denotatively. The commonsense viewpoint allows us to avoid thinking about the photographer’s motivations and opinions. After all, if the pictures were to read from a political viewpoint, then, they would probably belong on the opinion page and not considered straight news.
Moving beyond the commonsense viewpoint, we might arrive at something more oppositional and controversial.
From the perspective of the Arab world, the stop sign and the tank may signify a demand, plea, or suggestion. “Stop the tanks.”
From the perspective of the Western world, the stop sign and the building also connote a similar message. “Stop the bombing.”
What makes the relationship between the signifier and signified in news imagery more salient are the words that anchor meaning to the pictures in the form of captions. Without the textual interpretations captured in cutlines, we are left to our devices to make sense of the scenes. However, when we read what the pictures represent for the journalists who assign primary readings to them, everything changes.
In this week’s Newsweek magazine, Evan Thomas and Andrew Romano look at how myths are made in our culture. Myths, the writers argue, are not about lies, but more about narratives and stories that explain realities.
“Myths are a peculiar hybrid of truth and falsehood, resentments and ambitions, dreams and dread. We all have personal myths running through our heads, and some chapters would withstand fact checking while others would fail miserably.”
How do images contribute to the human proclivities of mythmaking?
I am inclined to believe that images, especially news images, play a very important role in creating and maintaining myths in a visually dominant culture. Because pictures play upon our emotions as well as our reason, it seems only natural to suspect a link between how some images may build meaning that go far beyond the original occurrence.