[reposting] "Is it really in the eyes of the beholder?"

The way that anyone views anything is going to vary depending on countless factors. It’s impossible to really guess how people are going to interpret aspects of life, let alone art; that can often have so many interpretations. Some of the biggest factors that affect outlook are upbringing, race, culture, gender, age, and exposure. Take this postcard, for example:

Depending on whether or not you are a man or a woman, young or old or someone who has a sense of humor or not would completely change the viewpoint on this cartoon. In Mccloud’s essay on “Vocabulary of Comics”, Mccloud talks about how when looking at a photo or image, there is a progression of what the eye sees- besides all societal factors, theres also a science behind it. He talks about how the progression goes from the overall picture, face to face to face and then the specifics of that face. Its interesting to think that at first the eye only catches the overall image, not the specifics of it, perhaps losing a lot of its integrity and strength. In this next photo, check out all the innuendos that could be caught: 

Mitchell, in his essay on “Picture Theory”, he talks about pictorial texts and the impact that texts end up having on the picture and the acceptance of the picture from the audience. He says that “texts present, in general, a greater threat to concepts of the integrity or purity of images than vice versa. For one thing, they unavoidably and literally impose themselves within and around the pictorial object…through which the object is seen and discourse about it is conducted”. This allows us to get a better understanding for how to interpret this photo but then it leads the art history geek in me to wonder whether we should read beyond the text and find a deeper meaning; find some “theory” to it. I am unsure how to interpret this photo:

Mccloud mentions that theirs a difference between looking at images at face value by just thinking that its “just ink on paper” rather than attempting to reach behind the photo and find those Mitchell theoretical devices. Mccloud goes on to explain though that in choosing to dissect a comic, one must understand the structure of the art itself, so “most comics art lies near the bottom, that is, along the iconic abstraction side where every line has a meaning”. These next two pictures offer some altering illustrations of strength and hardship and perseverance and prejudice.

In analyzing the messages behind these very seemingly different photos, Mitchell offers that there is a relationship between photography and language. He says that “photography is and is not a language and language also is and is not a photography…the relation of photography and language is a principle site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality”. It is these “contemporary representations of reality that I think give us the most clarity but also room for interpretation of photography or images in general because the nature of all of our “realities” are drastically different.