Visual Communication: Image Analysis
Visual communication contains image aspects. The interpretation of images is subjective and to understand the depth of meaning, or multiple meanings, communicated in an image requires analysis. Images can be analysed though many perspectives, for example these six major perspectives presented by Paul Martin Lester:
• Personal perspective: When a viewer has an opinion about an image based on their personal thoughts. Personal response depends on the viewer’s thoughts and values individually. This might be sometimes in conflict with cultural values. Also when a viewer has viewed an image with a personal perspective, it is than hard to change the view of the image on the viewer, even the image also can be seen in other ways.
• Historical perspective: An image’s view can be arising from the history of the use media. Through times sort images have been changed, because the use of different (new) media. For example: The result of using the computer to edit images (e.g. Photoshop) is quite different when comparing images that are made and edited by craft.
• Technical perspective: When the view of an image is influenced by the use of lights, position and the presentation of the image. The right use of light, position and presentation of the image can improve the view of the image. It makes the image looks better than the reality.
• Ethical perspective: From this perspective, the maker of the image, the viewer and the image itself must be responsible morally and ethically to the image. This perspective is also categorized in six categories: categorical imperative, utilitarianism, hedonism, golden mean, golden rule and veil of ignorance.
• Cultural perspective: Symbolization is an important definition for this perspective. Cultural perspective involves identity of symbols. The uses of words that are related with the image, the use of heroes in the image, etc. are the symbolization of the image. The cultural perspective can also be seen as the semiotic perspective.
• Critical perspective: The view of images in the critical perspective is when the viewers criticise the images, but the critics have been made in interests of the society, although an individual makes the critics. This way this perspective differs from the personal perspective.
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Famous quotes containing the words visual, image and/or analysis:
“Nowadays people’s visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.”
—Robert Doisneau (b. 1912)
“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all.... I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)