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Marguerite Helmers

The Elements of Critical Viewing

Marguerite Helmers (1961- ) is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where she teaches courses in Visual Rhetoric, The Rhetoric of Literature, and Film & Literary Studies. She has edited the two scholarly texts: Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms (2003) and The Traveling and Writing Self (2007). The following essay is adapted from Chapter Two of her book The Elements of Visual Analysis (2006).

A New Language

When you look at a family photograph, an image in an advertisement, or a poster on a coffee shop wall, what do you see? How might you turn your initial positive or negative reaction into a critical process of analysis? Critical viewing entails looking closely at an image to comprehend its structure and to evaluate the information presented. “What you see is a major part of what you know,” writes Donis Dondis, author of a popular visual studies handbook. Our goal is to move from being passive consumers of images to active interrogators. This takes study. Initially, if possible, we should think consensually and sympathetically, reading the image in the way that it appears to be intended to be read, avoiding critique until after we examine the elements of the image. This process involves a degree of intellectual largesse on our part, meaning that we grant to the author of the image our attempt to understand his or her judgments, even if we disagree. Thinking consensually is not always possible, especially when we view images of war, strife, and privation, because the images cause us to react with horror and outrage. Yet, our repulsion can be an agent for meaningful change as we seek to investigate the conditions under which images were created and disseminated.

Even though we begin by examining what the creator may have intended, we need to keep in mind that there is never a single interpretation of an image, so our goal is not to discover the right interpretation, but to offer potential readings of an image.

The goal of this chapter is to help you establish a process and develop a language for examining visual images. You not only want to describe what is there before you, you also want to understand why the creator made certain choices. Sylvan Barnett, the author of several texts on analyzing fine art, writes that we “see” with more than our eyes: when we look at objects and images, we engage emotions, memory, and ideology (the system of values and beliefs into which we have been educated).

Before continuing with your work, remember two things. First, to see images in their original contexts. While digital technology has made it possible for many art galleries, museums, and image lovers to put high-quality color images of paintings, photographs, and sculpture online, they all appear on the same small, flat screen. Missing is the context of viewing: the hushed tones of the art museum or the buzz of the coffee house. The ambient noises contribute to our mood and, when viewing the images before us, our mood can lead us to make certain decisions about the image. In addition, if your subject is painting, there is no reproduction that can enable you to experience the texture of thick paint on canvas.

Second, remember that, if you are working with images accompanied by text, you should try to read the images without the text in order to discover what message the illustrator was trying to convey. Even media such as cartoons that habitually join text and image still rely on conventions of image production to make sense. Sometimes, text and images work independently, even though they may be joined. At times, the image may contradict the text or the text may contradict the image.

Step-by-Step Analysis

There are nine steps to follow in this chapter. Each of the steps of critical viewing can be isolated from the others; you can write an analysis using only one or two of these steps. However, they are arranged to proceed in a logical process from initial reaction through research into the life of the creator and into the technical procedures used to create the image. In addition, the steps are recursive: they can be returned to at different points in the process of analysis.

Step One: Record Your Initial Impression

Every time we look at images, whether they are book jackets, advertisements, street signs, posters, billboards, or photographs in the newspaper, we immediately have a reaction. The image either compels us to examine it closer or to look away. Sometimes it is the subject of the image that draws us in.

If we are fascinated by a celebrity such as Britain’s Prince William, we may be drawn to pick up a supermarket tabloid and page through it while we wait in line with our purchases. Advertisers and magazine publishers depend on “warm,” or sympathetic, reactions from patrons to sell their products.

Yet we also have reactions, good or bad, to images that are not strictly commercial. The novel you are asked to purchase for your English class may have an image on the cover. If it is a classic work of literature, the image may be drawn from historical painting. If the novel is contemporary, it may have an abstract image on the cover, or even a photograph of the author. These images lead us to believe that we may want to read the book or initially convince us that the text between the covers is alien to our experiences.

A recent example of a book cover that was redesigned for different readership is the cover for the British edition of the first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling. (The British edition uses a different title than the American edition.) The first copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone were designed for children and used a colorful, cartoonish illustration of the hero Harry near the train that would take him to wizarding school, the Hogwarts Express. Once the book became a best-seller, the publisher discovered that adults were curious about the novel, but were somewhat reluctant to be seen reading a text with an illustrated cover. Consequently, they reissued the novel with a new cover, a black-and-white photograph of an ominous-looking locomotive traversing an urban landscape, billowing a cloud of black smoke. The tone of the cover changed from lighthearted and magical to dark and foreboding. If you are interested in this topic, search used bookstores, libraries, and the Internet for different editions of the same novel and compare their cover illustrations. The older the book, the more variety you will find in the covers, as they change across time.

Step Two: Place the Image in Context

Each image is developed from the knowledge and resources of a historical moment. The availability of materials at a particular time, in a certain geographic location provides a means of expression. Similarly, the audience, once familiar with certain standards of image production, comes to judge future images by comparing them to existing standards. As you conduct an analysis, you will want to take into consideration the time and place in which the image was created. This will mean that you socially situate the image in a context that is greater than just you looking closely.

The basic questions for contextual analysis are:

· Who created the image?

· When was it created?

· Where was it originally published and displayed?

· Who was the intended and initial audience?

· What medium is the image created from?

· Is there a title or caption that explains the subject of the image (or confounds explanation)?

· What is the subject of the image?

· What was the original purpose in creating and displaying the image?

You may be able to answer many of these questions by simply looking closely. If you are studying an advertisement for an automobile in Time or Wired magazine, you will be able to answer that the creator of the image is the car manufacturer who hired a photographer and a team of artists to create this image.

Because advertisements are concerned with selling the most up-to-date products, the advertising images were created close to the time of printing. The text in the advertisement also provides clues, by tying into current language, styles, and societal knowledge. If there is no text with the image other than the name of the manufacturer, we would need to look at other visual cues to date the image.

In searching for the tide of the work or the caption of the advertisement, you may find several. A literal caption is designed to identify and classify the type of product pictured so that the reader may develop brand recognition. Other text uses persuasive language that makes the claims for an improved life that the product will offer. As you look at advertisements, separate the identification of the product from the persuasive language of the copy. How does the text enhance or support the image?

Step Three: Describe the Image in Detail

Describing the image in detail allows us to focus on the way that the image has been put together by the creator. As viewers (“readers”) of the image, we should be able to conduct a close reading of many elements of the image, such as color, shape, and contrast. The arrangement of all the parts is called the composition of the image. In other words, we develop a vocabulary that allows us to discriminate, to make distinctions between different elements that compose the whole.

As you look closely at images, you can inventory, first, the literal elements of the image (Elements of Design), such as gradients of color and shadow; second, you can discuss the arrangement (Principles of Design) of the individual elements of the image.

One way to begin a formal analysis is to create a chart and fill in the blanks with notes that you write as you look at an image. This provides you with a list of design elements, the literal qualities of the image.

Elements of Design: Literal Elements

Literal Elements	Definitions
Color	Colors are identified by name, hue, tint, or intensity. Color schemes include primary colors (red, yellow, blue), secondary colors (orange, green, violet), and tertiary colors (the uneven mixture of primary colors). Color schemes can be warm (reds and oranges) or cool (blues).
Value	Particularly important when studying black-and-white images, value refers to lightness or darkness of color. The degree to which the image is given depth by shadows can also be considered here.
Line	A mark made by an instrument such as a pencil, pen, or brush creates a line. Its direction may be identified as horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. Lines can be thick or thin, sharp or blurred, curved or straight.
Shape	The outline or external contour of an object can be traced to find its shape. The term also refers to geometric figures such as the oval, circle, or square. Shape may be represented directly or implied by the arrangement of objects.
Form	Primarily an element of three-dimensional works, form refers to volume (height, width, and depth).
Texture	The surface of an object may be real (as in fabric) or simulated (as in a painting or photo). Surface qualities are described as rough, smooth, bumpy, etc.
Space	The distance between objects, the area around an object, or the open areas inside a three-dimensional object creates space. Space can be two-dimensional (suggested by outlines in a painting or photograph) or three-dimensional (created by form as in sculpture).

While all images have literal elements, they cannot have meaning beyond pure form without an arrangement into a sequence or series of relationships that mimic reality. Abstract art is given meaning by its literal elements of form; however, a family photograph, a photograph in an advertisement, or a painting of shepherds in a field consists of an arrangement of the elements that tell a story, create an emotion, or make an argument. The arrangement of the elements into a form that provides meaning is referred to as Principles of Design.

The key element of arrangement is perspective. The term perspective refers to a system of lines and proportions that creates the illusion of a three-dimensional surface on a two-dimensional object. One of the principal means of creating perspective is through the manipulation of the size of objects, called proportion. An object that is larger and placed in the foreground of an image is understood by viewers to be closer to them than a smaller-sized object placed along a plane in the background.

Another compositional technique used to place objects on the picture plane is that of an imagined or inscribed grid of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines. The center of the image may be placed at the center of the grid. Often, a dividing line is implied or inscribed and the images are mirrored on either side of that center point. The grid offers a flatter image surface than the perspective system, but it is used often in advertising as a means of laying out the interrelated elements of text and design.

Another term is vantage point. If you have ever stopped to take a picture of a building that towers above you such as a cathedral or skyscraper, you will turn your camera upward to catch the image. The building will angle upward in your photograph; your vantage point as a viewer of that photograph will place you below the subject. Most family photographs are taken so that the subjects look straight ahead at us. Our vantage point is on an even plane, symbolically placing us on an equal footing with the object. Many monuments are created so that we look up at them; our posture places us in a position of reverence and awe toward the monument.

Sometimes, in advertisements or in fine art, images are framed in order to direct the eye to the focal point. In this sense, the frame is not a physical object made of wood or metal (such as the picture frames that you have around your snapshots at home), but a construction within the image itself.

In images, certain visual ideas come to the fore, either through their perceived weight (using line, shape, and texture) or through their color. The dominance of particular visual elements gives the picture meaning. A prevalence of black in an image, for example, usually connotes death. If an object is large, taking up the entire frame, its dominance indicates its importance to the meaning of the image.

Ideas are also conveyed to an audience through balance, proportion, pattern, and contrast. While each of these terms has its own definition, they often cross-reference each other. For example, a balanced image gives the viewer a sense of harmony because of the pleasing repetition of shapes or forms in the image. The weight or dominance of these repeated elements unifies the image. Balance may be symmetrical (one side repeats the elements of the other side), asymmetrical (each side contains different elements, but uses the same weight), or radial (using a circle as a design template). Many artists use reflections in water or mirrors to create patterns and symmetry, arranging the parts along a dividing line. If something is balanced, it is also usually proportionate, meaning that the size of the elements and the quantity of the elements are measured according to the standards of perspective and customs of representing physical objects and space in the world.

Balanced images often make use of pattern-repeated images, shapes, colors, or lines-to create a meaning. At the same time, many images convey meaning by using contrast. A good example of contrast in an image is the placing of something old next to something new. Contrast also occurs when colors are altered or when light and dark intersect for effect.

Step Four: Identify Symbolic Elements

In an influential book called A Primer of Visual Literacy, author Donis Dondis proposes that visual information is processed on three levels: representational, abstract, and symbolic. Representational information is recognizable as something found in the environment (we sometimes call this “realism”). Abstract information is reduced to elemental components such as geometry, line and color. Symbolic information takes the form of conventional systems of communication in which humans have constructed signs and attached meaning to them. The alphabet and the number systems we use employ symbols. The curved symbol for the numeral 2, for example, does not replicate something found in nature, but expresses a concept about groups of things such as sheep, candles, or people.

As Dondis writes, symbols require “ultimate simplicity, the reduction of visual detail to the irreducible minimum.” Symbols need to be immediately understood, remembered, and replicated. The use of symbols to represent ideas is called iconography, from eikon, meaning “symbol;” and graph, meaning “writing.” Historically, many societies in Europe, South America, North America, Australia, and Asia used icons to represent transactions and record history. Cave paintings of buffalo and horses used symbols to communicate messages about hunting grounds or to celebrate animal gods.

In modern society, traffic signs and restroom signs perform the same function of communication, either aiding the reader or providing a warning. Corporations and organizations use icons to advertise their products or announce their services. Perhaps the most famous icon of the American road is the twin golden arches of McDonald’s. Icons that individuals and groups come to use are often highly abstract and frequently depend on cultural contexts to be fully understood.

When we discuss the symbolic content of images, though, we are not just dealing with iconography, but with a complex psychological system of meaning. One of the reasons that images are used so prevalently in American society is that they carry intellectual and emotional content. A photograph used in an advertisement is not merely a display of the product, but often is an argument about how we should live our lives. Similarly, a snapshot of a vacation in a family album is not merely an image of the beach or a mountain camp, but a memory of a pleasant past time. We can say, then, that while images are composed of literal elements, they also have a symbolic quality that constructs their meaning.

Step Five: Distinguish Absences

Images are so prevalent and persuasive that, even after identifying all the literal and symbolic elements of them, we may still not be aware that they contain significant absences. This theory of reading for absence has been called “reading against the grain.” All texts, visual and verbal, have manifest content, that which is immediately evident and shows us what the creators wanted us to see. When we read against the grain, we read for latent content, that which reveals the prejudices or biases of the creators or demonstrates unconscious misgivings about the subjects. In the arts and humanities, it has been used to investigate the stories and cultural contributions of African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and members of the working class; in literature, to open up the range of works studied in the literary canon; and in media studies, to ensure equal representation on television news and entertainment programming.

Step Six: Examine the Self as a Viewer of Images

One reason that we find ourselves looking at particular kinds of pictures is personal preference. Preferences are not natural (we are not born with particular dispositions toward, say, French Impressionist paintings of the late nineteenth century), but are learned. Our knowledge and biases are socially constructed from a host of influences: parents, teachers, friends, and the media. Too often, though, we become accustomed to tacitly acknowledging received notions of beauty. Imagine saying a sunset is ugly or that you hate bouquets of roses!

It is difficult to work against the grain and challenge ourselves to see things differently, because so many aspects of visual understanding in our society rely on the same codes: balance, symmetry, conventions of beauty, even moral codes about what is proper to display in public. Without realizing it, we approach each visual or verbal event with what literary critic Hans Robert Jauss termed a “horizon of expectations,” a mental construct of what is possible or desirable for particular situations. And most of looking closely is not changing our behavior but learning to understand our own behavior better.

Therefore, before you move on to the stage of interpreting an image, take a careful inventory of your own biases, preferences, and knowledge. Compare the self-inventory with the subject, the literal elements, and the design principles of the image. Perhaps you will notice a disjuncture or confirmation between the elements that helps explain why the image has prompted a reaction in you that is startling or pleasing.

Step Seven: Consider the Image’s Effect on the Viewer

Not altogether separate from our self-inventory is the consideration of how the literal elements of the image affect us. While creators of images employ color, shape, line, and texture to communicate certain meanings, readers interpret those meanings based on their cultural position and personal experiences. We call this affect. Affect theory describes the psychology of emotions that are prompted by images or words. Our memories of similar images combine with the present image in order for an image to have an effect on our emotional state (in other words, in order for us to be angered or interested). Thus, affect is not purely immediate, but involves a history and pattern of response.

Step Eight: Research the Image

Depending on the scope of your project, you may want to engage in research on your topic. In your research, you will consult books, journals, and websites. Because images appear in many contexts, your work may involve investigating business journals for articles on corporate image and advertising, researching art history books for biographical information on particular artists or schools of painting, consulting theater journals for articles on set design, or browsing online dictionaries for terms used in design. You may even consult interviews with the creator of the image to discover what he or she intended. Biographies also provide insight into the thought processes of the imagemakers.

Step Nine: Prepare an Interpretation

After conducting an inventory of the image and gathering your facts, you will be able to make an informed interpretation of the image. Interpretation offers a thesis about the meaning of the image, but also can make an argument about the value of the image. Art critics generally emphasize the latter, making a judgment about whether a picture is worth study: Is the subject a good one? Is the technique well executed? Has the creator of the image been overlooked by generations of scholars and critics? Has the image been overvalued or undervalued?