IvanBrady.com

[Brady, Ivan. (2003). “Notes on Analyzing a Photograph.” Unpublished Ms.]

Notes on Analyzing a Photograph

Ivan Brady

“All photographs tell stories about looking”
– Catherine Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic

I.

A photograph is an object presented to the viewer for interpretation. A critical approach to this process – one that does not take the interpretation for granted as a little “puzzle” to be solved – shows that many social and cultural meanings may combine to influence the process. All photographs tell stories about looking and worldview, on both sides of the camera. When we see photos of people, we interpret their facial expressions, clothing (or lack thereof), body posture, activities represented (working, playing, sleeping, standing still, etc.), the composition of their gaze (looking at the lens, looking at other people or objects, looking away in a manner that gives the seer/reader/interpreter voyeur power), and overall setting or landscape, among other considerations. Such features help to determine the context of interpretation when we encounter a photograph. We are prompted to “make sense” of it, to render it meaningful in some rational way. But what meaning is appropriate or “best”? How do we know? How would we explain our interpretation to others? Whose meaning is at stake in this exercise? The reader’s alone? The photographer’s? Are we able to “get” that somehow in a manner faithful to the maker’s intentions? How do we judge that? If people are shown in the photograph, what is the meaning of the actions depicted for them? How would you classify it? And what about the act of photographing subjects in the first place? Does the photograph show a reaction to that? Is it obviously staged or does it appear to be a candid shot?

Interpretation is a mutually constructed process, that is, it is derived from applying one’s own values to those presented by someone else. Meaning does not come out of a vacuum. It is loaded with presuppositions about the nature of the world and our place in it relative to other people, places, and things that present themselves in a variety of interactive contexts. “Reading” a photo is for these reasons and others as much an act of communication as an active conversation between you and another person. The difference of course is that the object of your interpretation in this case does not actively communicate with you. The messages are sent passively, frozen on paper or captured by some other medium – caged like animals to be studied in the frameworks of their imprisonments. But that makes the job of interpretation even more difficult in some ways. Caged animals are by definition animals removed from their naturally active contexts. We can only wonder what our relationships might be with them if we were face-to-face in the wild. We might have reasonable information about that (what a jaguar looks like in the jungle, etc.) but our only transportation to the situation is likely to be imagination coached by previous experience in related areas of thought and action. Vicarious (or virtual) traveling is not the same thing as “being there.” It can be vivid and it can be fun, as every film buff and fiction reader knows. But even if that is very realistic and informative, you will not sweat the same bullets in a stare-down with a caged predator that you would in an encounter separated only by a few feet of traversable ground in that animal’s natural habitat. The form of separation makes all the difference.

So it goes with photographs. We can’t look behind them or too far left or to the right of the edge of the paper for continuity. The margins of the photographic process stop us, freeze the moment, and set the boundaries of physical representation. Given still photographs of subjects that normally move, such as human beings or other animals, we can only imagine or infer from previous experience what might constitute patterns of real-time action and what else there might be in the larger landscape. Sometimes that is easy to do, say, when the photograph represents a wheatfield bending in the wind. The subject has limited action in the first place and we all have some idea of what wind blowing in the grass does to the stalks. The human acts of running or jumping are also easily put into a larger context of motion sequences as we bring them to life in our minds. We can also infer from facial expressions, body postures, and material settings what might have happened just before a photograph was taken and from that make a reasonable inference about what might follow in consequence – a man falling off a building will hit the ground, a look of satisfaction while seated at a dinner table suggests that the subject just ate, an emotionally disturbed person about to jump out at you could get you if the experience were located in something other than vicarious space and time, and so on. But it is also true that photos can be composed deceptively. The old adage that “cameras don’t lie” is itself a lie of sorts. Cameras only tell partial stories by definition and everybody knows that prints can be faked. Moreover, cameras have points of view because they are pointed at things by people who have points of view. Whatever kinds of “truth” one can find in a photograph are thus always subject to interpretation. The “face value” of a photograph is not always its ultimate value. Photographs may or may not be standardized or stereotyped by frame, content, and message, and many layers of meaning might lie just beneath the surface of the most obvious interpretation presented.

The Truth We Want to Find

The larger and more important point here is that the ideas and information we use to interpret these contexts are parts of our own culture – cultural matter we have absorbed from a lifetime of socialization and enculturation processes and have applied to countless interpretive situations as actors in and on the world. This is the “stuff” we use to make sense out of anything, including a photograph. Because it is ultimately (in the long run of cultural growth and development) an arbitrary assignment of meaning to things and experiences, it can vary widely in content from group to group. People see the world in their own terms, not necessarily in ours. Meaning in life is mutually constructed from the intersections of viewpoints (even in disagreements). Moreover, “I yam what I yam,” as Popeye says. We can only learn new things in terms of what we already know. So there is no “free ride” to objectivity here. You – the person – are an active part of the interpretive equation in all cases, whether analyzing a laboratory rat, doing a math equation, or simply trying to report the news objectively. We can’t get out of it. Interpretation is as essential to life as breathing and how we do it depends directly on the material we bring to bear on it as culturally-constructed beings. It follows that we have to know something about our own values – our preferences and prejudices, experiences and ignorances, wishes and wants – to make analytic sense of interpretations we apply to anything, including but not limited to photographs.

Catching ourselves in the act of jumping to conclusions about what things mean is a great place to start this “auto-ethnography.” What do we “want” to see in the photograph? Something that reinforces the world as we know it, see it, argue it, or want to believe exists? Are we finding the “truth we need to find” by some personal measure in the experience? That is, do we insist on finding a “truth” that reinforces what we think we know or want to believe in? “Mothers love their children” “Naked is unnatural.” “People unlike me are inferior.” “Cannibals are everywhere except here.” “Island life is especially idyllic – plenty to eat, nothing to do, uninhibited sexual access to anyone who winks at you.” “Penis gourds and body paint = full time servants of mumbo-jumbo, savages running around a jungle somewhere worshipping rocks and trees.” “Simple technology = simple minds.” It could be a very long (not to mention “wrong-headed”) list. The idea is to start making the list of what you see or think you see in a photograph. Then study the list carefully and ask yourself where these values come from and how valuable they are for revealing some essentials from both sides of a cross-cultural circumstance. What do you need to know to see the same situation from another person’s (or culture’s) point of view? Given that, how will you deal with the differences?

Primary and Secondary Meanings

Our language and normal brain function commitments to conjectural reasoning (drawing larger conclusions from smaller bits of information) make the meaning of things and events technically unlimited. There is no longest sentence, no last word in the collective pool of our experiences. In principle we can interpret anything that reaches our consciousness anyway we want. Viewing photographs is much like listening to a speaker in the sense that we want to “get” the primary or focal meaning of what is being displayed or said. Enculturation and practical experience guide that for us. “In my culture, saying this or doing that means this….” As ethnographers (observers of other cultures in general), we want to know how meaning gets limited, sorted into primary meanings (including names for things), given certain contexts, and so on. But that’s not enough. We also want to know about the things that go with the names, so to speak – whatever else is associated with the primary meanings by tradition (other meanings of a word, etc.) and what makes sense in new and creative associations (new metaphors, poetry) in that particular cultural pool of possibilities.

A focal meaning (denotation) defines the moment but is also variable by context. Think about it. We all have an idea about what it means to be naked. What constitutes “naked” (undressed) can vary from culture to culture, depending on views of the nature and functions of clothing, among other considerations. “Nude” (body skin display) is a different and relatively neutral concept but can thus appear in variable contexts where it is either considered in more or less clinical terms (the art studio model) or is highly sexualized in all forms (e.g., in traditional Muslim communities). The concept of nude slips into the category of – is judged by the cultural standards of – being “naked” in these cases but they remain different concepts in principle. The ways these concepts are combined to make meaning about bodies and their public displays helps to define the context of interpretation for both the actors themselves and for their interpreters. We also know that it means something quite different in our culture if we are naked in the bathtub as opposed to being naked on the subway, in the doctor’s office, on the subway, at a sex club, and so on.

Secondary meanings (connotations) abound or can be inferred in nearly all expressions. They can also become primary or focal meanings with a change in emphasis or context. Traveling through a highway intersection, we could change our primary focus to the amber color in a traffic signal, ignoring its primary signification as a “caution” light, and begin to luxuriate in its aesthetics. Convention and the danger of cross-traffic keep us from doing so. But it could be done in principle quite easily and in fact is the kind of thing we do when we start to ponder the world around us in any capacity: we bring underlying and perhaps newly discovered dimensions to the fore. That’s the bulk of the art of poetic interpretation. It can be genius; it can be madness. The activity is governed by context – free to disobey convention, free to interpret, to innovate, free perhaps to “play” and to express the results to others around us. Every society has rules governing these activities, including rules for breaking rules.

Context

Context is practically everything for determining meaning. It is the key to identifying what we can assume will be the primary meaning of the events in which we encounter such things as “nakedness.” Here’s another example to help make the point: Often photographed for such cultural icons as National Geographic magazine, public displays of women’s breasts have similarly variable contexts that reveal much about the cultures of the displayers and the beholders. Showing breasts while working in traditional Polynesian culture settings does not have a primary or focal meaning anchored in eroticism. Working bare-chested was considered normal and incidental to whatever else was happening. None of that is possible in cultures (e.g., Western) that have fetishized breasts (and other body parts) and imbued them with focal eroticism. Strip tease only makes sense in these contexts as well. Collectively these values help to determine our behavior, including the substance and meanings of our interpretations of events. If you are a Western man who encounters the bare breasts of women at work, say, in their taro gardens in Polynesia, what are you likely to focus on first? The answer is so common it is stereotyped. Polynesian women caught in these circumstances by the gazes of Western men see the “gawking” for what it is – an annoying and distracting change of meaning from incidental to focal – and they usually show their displeasure through their faces and turn away or cover themselves up with their arms or existing clothing.

Our culture defines those contexts for us and saturates them with values, some of which may not be so obvious and are generally not contained or displayed in their entirety in any single event or object such as a photograph. One has to be familiar with the larger cultural premises and histories to “get’ these richer and deeper meanings – as Clifford Geertz says, to be able “to tell the difference between a wink and a twitch” in that culture. That takes experience and a systematically self-conscious study of ourselves and others to learn. But it all has to start somewhere and in our case we are starting with a critical look at ourselves in the act of “seeing” others across cultural boundaries as they are embodied in photographs.

More Winks and Twitches

Ethnocentrism and poor methods get in the way of our ability to tell a wink from a twitch in the contexts of studying others, as they are represented in life or in the little slices of life we capture with the magic of the camera. They add distortions to our interpretations and representations of events in general, but they are magnified many times over when they are taken across cultural boundaries. By the same token, putting our values in unfamiliar contexts offers a great opportunity for us to isolate them, to catch ourselves in the act of jumping to conclusions about what things mean, and thereby about the nature of the world and our place in it. That information helps to define who we are and how we got to be that way, how we think of ourselves as individuals and as citizens of the world, and how we want others to see us in our relations with them. These are fundamental questions that represent essential points of analysis and interpretation in any photographic essay assignment.

II.

At minimum you will need to answer these questions in analyzing a photograph: (1) In your estimation, what is the picture “about”? (2) What kind of photograph is it? Close-up, long-distance? Black and white? Color? (3) If it includes people, is the shot candid or posed (or perhaps even posed as candid)? (4) What cultural features allow you to identify the culture of the people involved? (5) Does the photograph include more than one culture? How do you identify each? Can you identify both? (6) If one is your own, can the “other” culture be named specifically from your past experience? Or is it simply a matter of “obviously not your own culture,” therefore “Other”? (7) Is that enough information for you to “get” the message of the photograph? (8) Does it make any difference if you know exactly who the Others are? Why?

I have attached three appendices to this document, one on analyzing advertisements (A); one on semiotic codes in photography (B); and one that is a student worksheet on ethnographic motion pictures (C). Look them over carefully. You will find some important suggestions for your own project.

III.

Key terms: Culture, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, socialization, enculturation, semiotics, meaning construction, metaphor, world view, reflexive perspectives, the social construction of reality.

APPENDIX A

Analyzing Signs and Sign Systems Displayed in Advertising

[Adapted from Arthur Asa Berger, Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics. Salem, WI: Sheffield, 1999, pp. 187-189.]

(a) What is the general ambience of the advertisement? What mood does it create? How does it do this?

(b) What is the design of the advertisement? Does it use axial balance or some other form? How are the basic components or elements of the advertisement arranged?

(c) What is the relationship that exists between pictorial elements and written material and what does this tell us?

(d) What is the spatiality in the advertisement? Is there a lot of “white space” or is the advertisement full of graphic and written elements (that is, “busy”)?

(e) What signs and symbols do we find? What roles do the various signs and symbols play in the advertisement?

(f) If there are figures (men, women, children, animals) in the advertisement, what are they like? What can be said about their facial expressions, poses, hairstyle, age, sex, hair color, ethnicity, education, occupation, relationships (of one to the other), and so on?

(g) What does the background tell us? Where is the action in the advertisement taking place and what significance does this background have?

(h) What action is taking place in the advertisement and what significance does this action have? (This might be described as the plot of the advertisement.)

(i) What theme or themes do we find in the advertisement? What is the advertisement about? (The plot of an advertisement may involve a man and a woman drinking but the theme might be jealousy, faithlessness, ambition, passion, etc.)

(j) What about the language used in the advertisement? Does it essentially provide information or generate some kind of an emotional response? Or both? What techniques are used by the copywriter: humor, alliteration, “definitions” of life, comparisons, sexual innuendo, and so on?

(k) What typefaces are used and what impressions do these typefaces convey?

(l) What is the item being advertised and what role does it play in American culture and society?

(m) What about aesthetic decisions? If the advertisement is a photograph, what kind of a shot is it? What significance do long shots, medium shots, close-ups have? What about the lighting, use of color, angle of the shot?

(n) What sociological, political, economic or cultural attitudes are indirectly reflected in the advertisement? An advertisement may be about a pair of blue jeans but it might, indirectly, reflect such matters as sexism, alienation, stereotyped thinking, conformism, generational conflict, loneliness, elitism, and so on.

APPENDIX B

Photograph Codes

[From Lutz, Catherine and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 285.]

World location

Unit of article organization (region, nation-state, ethnic group, other)

Number of photos including Westerners in an article

Smiling in photograph

Gender of adults depicted

Age of those depicted

Aggressive activity or military personnel or weapons shown

Activity level of main foreground figures

Activity type of main foreground figures

Camera gaze of person photographed

Surroundings of people photographed

Ritual focus

Group size

Westerners in photo

Urban versus rural setting

Wealth indicators in photo

Skin color

Dress style (“Western” or local)

Male nudity

Female nudity

Technological type present (simple handmade tools, machinery)

Vantage (point from which camera perceives main figures)

APPENDIX C

Ethnographic Film Worksheet

[Adapted from: Heider, Karl G. 1997, 2001. Seeing Anthropology: Cultural Anthropology Through Film. 1st and 2nd eds. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997, p. 9; 2001, pp. xvi-xvii]

Title of Film:

Culture(s) shown:

Main subjects:

1. What is your previous experience with this film? With the cultures portrayed in it?

2. How deeply is the film informed by anthropological questions? When does it deal with the sorts of anthropological issues raised in this course, and when is it a more general portrayal of events? How ethnographic is it?

3. Does the film represent the people’s own point of view? Or does some disembodied foreign narrator treat the people as mere exotics?

4. Since film is communication, whose voice or point of view is on the soundtrack?

5. What is the art/science balance? Do aesthetic production values win out over ethnographic values?

6. Can you tell if and how the film crew influenced the behavior of the actors?

7. Does the film create empathy or disgust? Does it make the audience more sympathetic or less sympathetic toward the culture?

8. How effectively does the film balance wide shots, which show people in context, with close-ups, which show details of faces and processes?

9. Does the film show complete acts—beginning, climax, and end—or does it just cut in and out at peak moments?

10. Given that films are composed of visuals, usually in ethnographic films with a narrated text (words spoken by unseen narrators or by participants), whereas books are mainly texts with some visuals, there is not an absolute difference between film and book but you can still contrast the visuals and ask:

How visual is the film?

How verbal is the film?

What is conveyed by visuals? By words?

[For Book and Movie projects: Are the visuals and the text complementary, contradictory, or unconnected?]

11. Given that any film involves a tremendous amount of selection in shooting and then in editing, how much cultural distortion can you see in the film, and to what extent might it affect the ethnographic integrity of the film? Send mixed messages to the general public? Contribute to stereotypes already in place in the viewing society?