Learning to Look Archives - JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/column/visual-literacy/ from JSTOR, nonprofit library for the intellectually curious Sat, 24 Jun 2023 14:22:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/JSTOR_Daily_logo_square-copy-300x300.jpg Learning to Look Archives - JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/column/visual-literacy/ 32 32 Browsing for Images? Search Filters Are Your Friend https://daily.jstor.org/browsing-for-images-search-filters-are-your-friend/ Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:33:58 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295903&preview=true&preview_id=295903 The images that stick with us the most tend to be those we find by chance. That’s where search filters come in.

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As we learned in the last Learning to Look article, metadata serves as a bridge between humans conducting searches and visual content found in online database resources. Searching with metadata in mind allows users to leverage extrinsic information about image files, making it easier to locate specific images, filter search results, and improve a search’s relevance and precision. Understanding precisely what metadata are associated with images allows us find images that best align with our needs through a keyword search.

But what if your image needs are less precise? What if you’re looking for images within certain parameters but you can’t find the right keywords to deliver satisfying search results? Or perhaps you want only to explore images for inspiration, and chance encounters are your primary goal?

Metadata also provides a useful foundation for less focused browsing or for those times when you may not know exactly what type of image you’re looking for. Browsing takes advantage of metadata that repeats across all images in a database and groups the images into categories.

Begin to Browse

The best approach to browsing is to remember that images are always part of bigger groups of objects that have shared features, whether that’s similar metadata or being part of organized collections. To get the most out of browsing an online image resource, it can be helpful to think of the process as similar to wandering a museum: rather than making a bee-line for a specific work of art, you’re more likely going to explore galleries organized by geography, period, material, or even color.

While the process of browsing is creative, iterative, and difficult to replicate, a few strategies, including leveraging existing collections, using filters instead of keyword searches, and exploring the image recommendation tools built into many databases, can start you on the right track.

Dive into Collections

One of the easiest ways to stop searching and start browsing is to explore images by collection. On a basic level, collections are just groups of images that were, at some point, assembled by humans. Two kinds of collections are commonly found in online image resources:

  1. Institutional collections. Digital image libraries such as those shared by the Library of Congress and JSTOR allow users to browse collections based on the contributing institution. Most archives and museums collect material within certain parameters and organize them into smaller collections based on the donor or subject matter. Finding and browsing collections that align with your needs or simply pique your interest, like this collection of citrus crate labels from Azusa Pacific University, will inevitably lead to new, surprising discoveries.
  2. Curated collections. Many platforms offer thematic collections, such as Europeana’s Collections and Google Arts and Culture’s Themes. Think of these as an online version of a museum exhibition: someone has curated a selection of images that relate to a specific subject, using a filter of human understanding in addition to metadata to collect items related to it. Wherever you’re looking to browse images, look for a tab or button that says “Explore,” “Themes,” or “Collections.”
Star Dust Brand citrus crate label
Star Dust Brand citrus crate label

Skip the Search and Try the Filters

Filters may be a familiar tool for narrowing down a keyword search but consider skipping a search all together and starting with filters. Most platforms don’t make this option obvious, but there are a few ways to reveal filters without a text search.

Try clicking the search button without typing in any search terms—on sites like Getty Images and Flickr, this brings up a menu of filters ranging from date and color to content and license type. Most platforms will let you search a wildcard, often an asterisk (*), to generate a list of all items in the database with the option to add filters later. On JSTOR Images, you can start a filter-only search by selecting an initial filter such as classification or geography.

What is an Image Search Filter?

In a JSTOR image search, as well as most other image databases, the filters are categories that appear to the left of the results. If you’ve read the previous Learning to Look column, many of the categories will be familiar: they’re metadata fields such as Paintings, photographs, and Prints, which can be used to sort an entire image library into related groups. This provides an opportunity to define overlapping categories to narrow the results, like pairing a classification or location filter with a color or date filter. This is a great way to explore a large image library, whether these filters align with your image need or they just connect you with unexpected and thought-provoking image combinations.

From left to right, filters on Getty Images, Library of Congress, and JSTOR Images

Explore Recommended Images

After browsing by collection or using filters to explore an entire image library, many image resources online will recommend items related to ones you’ve recently selected. The Library of Congress, for example, lists “More items like this” and “Images you may also like” below each selected image. Openverse and JSTOR Images provide the same opportunity to browse in a “Related” section following an image and its metadata.

Sidney Hall’s (?-1831) astronomical chart illustration of the Taurus. Original from Library of Congress. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.” by Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel is licensed under CC BY 2.0.


Browsing allows for serendipitous discoveries and inspiration by leveraging shared features and organized collections within image databases. Strategies such as diving into collections, utilizing filters instead of keyword searches, and exploring recommended images can enhance the image-seeking experience, opening up new possibilities and unexpected connections. By embracing the creative and iterative nature of browsing, you can unlock the full potential of online image resources and embark on a visual journey of exploration and inspiration.

Learning to Look will be on hiatus this summer, explore past articles in the Learning to Look archive and discover other JSTOR Daily articles that highlight Shared Collections.


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Metadata for Image Search and Discovery https://daily.jstor.org/metadata-for-image-search-and-discovery/ Thu, 25 May 2023 12:10:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=300688&preview=true&preview_id=300688 Metadata helps you search for and find images of cats, for instance, whether or not you have a specific feline in mind.

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How do you use a search engine to find images? What keywords will you use to improve your search results?

It can be difficult to translate what we want to see in an image into words. Humans can identify thousands of intertwined visual components of an image that aren’t easily described by search terms. We can even imagine what an image might look like without knowing whether it even exists. A search engine lacks that creativity.

The power of the average human brain, at least at the moment, far outstrips the ability of any computer-based technology. While the brain is technically millions of times slower at performing basic computational steps than a computer, Liqun Luo at Stanford University reminds us that “humans triumph over computers in numerous real-world tasks—ranging from identifying a bicycle or a particular pedestrian on a crowded city street to reaching for a cup of tea and moving it smoothly to one’s lips—let alone conceptualization and creativity.”

This semantic gap, or the disparity between an image’s digital and human interpretation of image content, tends to limit accuracy and success of these searches. It’s difficult for search engines to understand the context, meaning, and objects within an image solely based on pixel information. In fact, even when it seems like you’re getting search results based on an image’s content, you’re actually getting results based on the text associated with the image, what librarians call “metadata.” If the metadata for an image is limited because there’s very little text associated with an image its digital record, or if the descriptions are subjective or inaccurate, it can make this task even more difficult.

* * *

AI-based visual search tools are already beginning to change this. If you have an iPhone, for example, you may notice that you can search simple terms like “dog” or “food” in your photos and access images that include those things with modest accuracy (when I search “dog” in my photos, I get twenty-one pictures of cats and one shoe). Amazon Lens allows you to take photos of objects in your space and search for similar products.

In the future, image recognition, object detection, and enhanced metadata extraction tools like this, which allow the computer to generate metadata from the image itself, rather than looking for human-generated text associated with the image, will likely become much more widespread and accurate as the datasets they train on expand. By combining these advancements, AI has the potential to revolutionize image search, making it easier, more intuitive, and capable of understanding and fulfilling user needs more accurately. AI promises a future where people can easily search for images with shared visual features, a task that’s nearly impossible with currently publicly available tools, as even minor variations in color, angle, lighting, or composition can make it difficult to identify similar images accurately.

At the moment, though, successfully finding images relies heavily on how well search terms connect with image metadata. Sometimes this includes descriptions of an image’s visual content, but often it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, searches that describe visually what you’re looking for are unsuccessful. While AI tools in the future may help bridge the gap between what we expect to/want to see and how we access it, for now, understanding metadata and applying those skills is the best way to be successful locating images.

* * *

So, what is metadata? Metadata refers to descriptive information that provides details about other data, like documents, files, images, and videos, whether digital or physical. Describing metadata for novels, for example, José Calvo Tello says, “Metadata is knowledge about the text, formalized in a way that is computationally accessible.” Metadata’s ability to be computer-readable is what allows us to sort, search, and ultimately access images in databases like JSTOR.

Essentially, metadata is data about data. When you open a folder on your computer and see a list of file names with their dates and file types, you’re looking at a list of metadata! Metadata can include a wide range of information, depending on the context and purpose. When it comes to digital images, metadata typically includes:

  • Descriptive metadata providing information about the image itself like a title, description, keywords, or material type.
  • Administrative metadata describing the creation, ownership, and management of the image like the creator, creation date, owner, rights, and permissions.
  • Technical metadata is not always visible on a user’s end but includes technical aspects of an image like file format, size, resolution, etc.

Good metadata associated with an image can fill in a lot of blanks when you’re looking to learn more about an image. This information can also bridge the gap between your search and the images you are looking for. When searching in any platform for images, the words you input are compared directly to the words in images’ metadata. Descriptive and administrative metadata (like the creator, culture, title, and work type from the JSTOR example above) tend to be the most useful for accessing images through a search, largely because these are still human-generated and reflect the language that end-users are likely to input when searching.

* * *

Searching with metadata in mind allows users to leverage additional information about images, making it easier to locate specific images, filter search results, and improve relevance and precision. When you have a clear understanding of your image need, the next step is to consider metadata and navigate any barriers that come with using text to search for images.

  1. Consider what metadata might be attached to your goal images. This might be as easy as identifying the name of an image you’re looking for or the name of the image’s creator. Unless you’re seeking a specific artwork, though, this may not be an option. Names of places, types of material, and dates can also return relevant search results.
  2. Conduct preliminary research. Even a quick Google search will help you identify potential terms to use when locating images. Who would have created images like the ones you are looking for? What organizations or institutions would host those images? What keywords or descriptors would someone have associated with those kinds of images? When would they have been created?
  3. Try more than one resource. Despite their breadth, popular search engines will not connect you to every image or even the most relevant images. Explore other image resources that might fit your need and search across multiple platforms.
  4. Search and search again. Most of us do this intuitively: when we perform a search that doesn’t go as planned, we immediately revise our search terms. Crafting multiple searches is essential to finding images, and doing so in a thoughtful way makes each search more successful than the last.

* * *

Searching for images is a journey, and iterative searching is key to successful image retrieval. The first search may not be successful, but it will guide you towards what you should or should not type into a search bar to get the images you need.

If you saw the image below, how would you describe it in a few words?

A woman in a dark bathing suit sitting on a beach, holding a Chinese-style parasol over her shoulder.
A fair bather by Leslie Adkin

Based on the image’s metadata, if you were to search “swimming”, “umbrella”, “swimsuit”, “vacation”, “sand”, “outdoor”, or even “portrait”, this image would not come up in your search results. Sometimes different institutions or individuals generating metadata for images will use different words to mean the same thing, like dress, clothing, garment, and costume. Anticipating this and trying multiple synonymous search terms to generate different results can connect you with a wider variety of potentially relevant images. While “swimsuit” and “umbrella” would not return this image in a list of search results, “bathing suit” and “parasol” would.

The same word might also be used to refer to different things, like using “costume” to refer to clothing or to refer specifically to clothing worn during performances. When encountering unexpected or irrelevant results when searching homonyms, it helps to add clarifying keywords to your search, such as specifying “China photograph,” “china doll,” or “china plate.”

China plate fragment; Brise fan; Doll; Li Hung Chang, China’s greatest Viceroy and Diplomat, photographed in his Yamen, Teintsin, China, 1900; 14 China fragments; Miniature china cabinet; China set; Gee Ching Dong (Herbert Gee-Dong), Wong Yuk Lan (Lily Gee-Dong) and baby Norman Gee-Dong

When searching in English, we must also consider that English is spoken differently and with different vocabulary across the world. Searching “bathing suit” in collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, an American museum, yields results you might expect if you are an American English speaker. In collections from the Museum of New Zealand – Te Papa Tongarewa, the phrase “bathing costume” is much more successful. If you were looking for swimwear from other time periods, bathing gown, tank suit, or caleçon might yield better results depending on the targeted era.

JSTOR

Often, an image need doesn’t translate neatly into an image title or subject, hindering easy access through a keyword search. Taking a moment to search related terms in addition to the first few that come to mind will broaden a search considerably. A search for any of the swimwear-related terms we have discussed may turn up fairly good results, but you may find that identifying common contexts for such images may yield additional, or even better, results. This could include thinking about who might wear swimsuits—bather, swimmer, surfer—where they might don swimwear—beach, pool, sand—or when a bathing suit is commonly worn—picnicking, swimming, sunbathing.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.27115202https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.27027971https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.27114686
Crowd in the water, Opononi by Eric Lee-Johnson; Woman’s bathing costume by Ada of California; Mary and Dot Webby at Otaki Beach by Leslie Adkin

* * *

Repetitive searching is time-consuming and can be discouraging, but there are ways to streamline searches, even while expanding into related terms and other metadata fields. Two techniques are:

  • Truncation: Many image searches allow you to use search truncation, or stemming. This allows you to search the root of a word with a symbol attached to the end and get results that include various word endings. Searching on swim* would return hits for swim, swims, swimming, swimmer, swimsuit, and swimwear all at once. The symbol can vary by database, but most use an asterisk, including JSTOR.
  • Boolean Operators: Take a step beyond the search bar and try the advanced search feature available on JSTOR and most other image resources. The Boolean operator “OR” allows you to search multiple alternate terms at once, like swimsuit OR bathing suit OR bikini rather than performing three separate searches. “AND” placed between two terms performs a search requiring both terms to be included in an image’s metadata, like swim AND beach. “NOT” excludes results with unwanted terms in their metadata, like pool NOT geothermal.

To explore more tips for using JSTOR image search, check out our LibGuide.

* * *

Having a specific image need in mind and thoughtfully combining it with search terms that relate to available metadata can make searching for images much easier. In the next Learning to Look column, we’ll think through how to explore images more broadly and browse to encounter the unexpected.


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How to Find and Choose the Best Images for Your Project https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-find-and-choose-best-images-for-research-project/ Thu, 04 May 2023 14:37:08 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295902&preview=true&preview_id=295902 To spot high-quality images, you'll need to draw on your basic visual literacy skills.

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As we’ve been learning in this visual literacy column, images tell stories. From photographs to illustrations to maps, they offer glimpses into moments beyond our reach and help us better understand our world. Delving into a variety of visual materials, we’ve learned to recognize the elements that make up an image—such as composition, color, and symbolism—and understand how each contributes to an image’s overall interpretation or significance. Developing visual literacy skills such as these enhances our understanding and appreciation of all images—those we seek out intentionally and those we encounter by chance: a billboard passed during a commute, an image in a newspaper article, a photo shared on social media. It also helps us sort through and evaluate the quality of the images we see and make choices about which images are relevant for our specific purpose.

To take the next step in our journey towards visual literacy, we need to know where to find high-quality images that meet our research needs and what questions to ask about the images we decide to use.

Why Do You Need the Image?

When beginning to look for images or other visual material, it’s important to first understand the nature of your need, to ask yourself why you’re seeking out images in the first place. You might be using them to learn more about a current topic or to research different perspectives on a topic. Alternatively, you might simply be looking for something visually appealing or interesting to inspire you. Depending on your end goal, the types of images and places you’ll look are different.

Evening dresses designed by Jeanne Hallée, 1910–1914; Fashion illustration by Otto Friedrich Carl Lendecke, 1912; Seated studio portrait of an unidentified woman in an evening gown, c. 1915 by William Davis Hassler

What is the Topic You are Exploring?

When it comes to recognizing what kind of visual information you need to better understand a topic, it’s important to consider contextual factors such as the age and material of the image. A painting of a king in regalia from a historical period might offer valuable insights into the culture and customs around royalty of that time. Conversely, a more recent image of the same garments on display provides access to greater detail about the king’s clothing but loses some of the historical context and emphasis provided by the artist.

Age also affects the kind of information you can glean from an image. Are you attempting to understand a historical moment? Images produced at that time will provide something closer to a firsthand account, influenced by contemporaneous beliefs and contexts, while an image created much later will be interpreting and reflecting that moment with the benefit of hindsight.

Consider also the genre or format of image you are seeking. Different media types, such as photographs, illustrations, or infographics, can offer different information about a topic. For example, an infographic might provide a succinct summary of complex data while a photograph might offer a window into a specific event or moment. A work of art may provide a more emotional or visceral connection to a particular topic.

Abraham Lincoln, from the series Great Americans (N76) for Duke brand cigarettes, 1888; Abraham Lincoln by Leonard Wells Volk, 1860, cast ca. 1914; President Abraham Lincoln, Major General John A. McClernand (right), and E. J. Allen (Allan Pinkerton, left), Chief of the Secret Service of the United States, at Secret Service Department, Headquarters Army of the Potomac, near Antietam, Maryland, 1862

Who Made the Image?

It’s crucial to build an understanding of authorship and different perspectives. Think about who is creating and sharing the images and what their goals and motivations might be. We may also consider the creator’s personal beliefs, the context in which the image was created, and other factors that may shape an image.

We’ve discussed authorship in the context of bias and seeking multiple viewpoints, but it’s also beneficial to consider when you’re determining where to look for images. When seeking visual information, we often need a particular perspective.

Where Should You Look for Quality Images?

Just like finding images from various types of creators yields distinct results, you get different kinds of images depending on where you look for them. Although there are innumerable image resources available and easily accessible online, it’s important to seek out reliable and high-quality sources. These aren’t necessarily difficult to find and are usually free to use. Depending on your need, resources might include stock photo websites, public domain image collections, institutional archives—like museums or universities—and more. It’s also important to consider the context in which the image will be used, as certain sources might not allow for commercial use or might require attribution.

There are many resources available that provide access to high-quality images online, including:

  1. The Library of Congress has a vast collection of digitized images—including photographs, maps, and prints—from its own collections as well as other institutions. The images cover a wide range of topics, including American history, world cultures, and science and technology.
  2. AP Newsroom offers a vast archive of contemporary and historical news photos, covering a wide range of events and subjects from around the world. With a focus on journalism, this resource provides a window into the major news events of the past and present.
  3. Europeana is a digital library of cultural heritage collections from across Europe, including images, videos, and audio recordings.
  4. Getty Images is a commercial stock image company that also offers a large selection of historical images, including photographs, illustrations, and artwork. While not all images are free, Getty Images offers a substantial selection of images that can be licensed for use in research and educational settings.
  5. Digital Public Library of America provides access to millions of digitized materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. It includes a collection of historical images, including photographs, maps, and documents.
  6. Asia Art Archive collects and provides access to materials related to contemporary art and visual culture in Asia, including photographs, documents, and artworks.
  7. Digital South Asia Library, from the University of Chicago, provides access to digital materials related to South Asia, including historical photographs, manuscripts, and books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia.
  8. Trove, provided by the National Library of Australia, includes a large collection of digitized historical images, including photographs, artworks, and maps, from Australia and the Pacific region covering a wide range of topics, including Australian history, culture, and society.
  9. Openverse is a Creative Commons search engine that allows users to find and use openly licensed images and other media for a variety of uses.

These are just a few examples of online resources that provide access to historical and contemporary images from across the world. Some of these and many other historical collections are also part of JSTOR Collections, providing an access point to explore a wide variety of visual material that you likely won’t find through Google. Exploring these and other sources can broaden your perspective on historical topics and discover unique images that can enhance your research.

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By forming a clearer understanding of your initial needs as well as the likely context and sources in which relevant images may be found and used, you can better identify and locate the types of images that will best serve you. Actively seeking out reliable and high-quality sources will ensure that the images you use are accurate, ethical, and effective in enhancing your understanding of a topic.

In the next article, we’ll dive deeper into strategies for effectively finding the best images. In the meantime, try exploring JSTOR Collections and considering which of the images you find there might meet your research needs.


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How to Look at Art and Understand What You See https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-look-at-art-and-understand-what-you-see/ Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:30:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295901&preview=true&preview_id=295901 There are dozens of ways of looking at visual art. None of them are wrong, but certain methods facilitate deeper connection and understanding.

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In a recent Learning to Look column, we explored magazine covers and posters, trying to determine the creator’s intention. Examining the visual components of these artifacts, in conjunction with key framing information like associated text or time period, helped us uncover the deliberately crafted “meaning” of the pieces. The skills of visual analysis we learned in that context are useful even when the message of a visual object is less fixed and open to interpretation, such as with a work of fine art.

Imagine we’re walking through a museum together. Separated by time and space, we can do this together through JSTOR Shared Collections such as the Wofford College Fine Art Collection. Now that we’ve spent several months together pulling apart the components of visual communication, you may be inclined to linger longer than you might have before, searching each artwork for more information and meaning.

Italian Street Scene by Arthur Vidal Diehl, early 20th century; Horyeopdo (Hunting Scene), unknown Korean painter, late 19th or early 20th century; Rasa-lila; Pichwai, unknown Indian painter, 20th century
Italian Street Scene by Arthur Vidal Diehl, early 20th century; Horyeopdo (Hunting Scene), unknown Korean painter, late 19th or early 20th century; Rasa-lila; Pichwai, unknown Indian painter, 20th century

* * *

There are dozens of ways of looking at visual art, each shaped by the creators and the various contexts in which the pieces appear. None of them are wrong, but certain methods facilitate deeper connection and understanding.

In today’s column, we’ll explore two approaches to looking at art. First, we’ll follow closely the methodology we’ve explored in the column up to now. Then we’ll try another in which we’ll react naturally to a piece, then look again, revising our assumptions about what we see, until we come to an understanding. We can think of these as taking either a form-first approach or an intuitive approach. Neither of these strictly adheres to an analytical method you might find an art historian undertaking in an academic text. Instead, these are practical ways that you can informally but deliberately encounter works of art, thoughtfully observing and investigating your own visual experiences and eventually learning to talk about what you see with confidence.

If you are comfortable looking at art but wish to more deeply interrogate works and your response to them, an intuitive approach might feel more grounded. If, on the other hand, you do not consider yourself someone to whom probing a work of art comes easily, a form-first approach may give you the structure and confidence to confront art head-on.

* * *

Art critics in the early twentieth century primarily concerned with formalism, including Roger Fry and Clive Bell, were largely responsible for taking foundations of compositional analysis disseminated in the seventeenth century and transforming it into the language of formal analysis that we use to describe the elements of art and principles of composition. This vocabulary helps us break down the visual components of a work and examine their effects before exploring what we think we see and what may not be immediately apparent.

  1. Identify: How are elements of art (line, form, color, etc.) used?
  2. Describe: How does the composition work as a whole?
  3. Connect: How does what you see relate to what is known about the artwork’s subject, creator, historical context, etc.?
  4. Interpret: What might the work be expressing or communicating? How do you react to it?

When exploring and appreciating art for its own sake, there is no need to parse each element. In the print you see below, two elements stand out immediately: color and line. Pale blue, yellow, and grey dominate, though bits of red punctuate the scene. Line is used heavily to define shapes as well as give expression to the star of the show: the rain.

One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (名所江戸百景) by Andō Hiroshige, 1856-59
One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (名所江戸百景) by Andō Hiroshige, 1856-59 via JSTOR

This composition is clearly split into distinct foreground, middle ground, and background, balanced by their approximately equal size and unified by the lines of rain that slash across the entire picture. Everything looks a bit off-kilter—the distant shore tips down diagonally while the bridge arcs up—but the triangular segments the forms create largely balance one another. Movement is suggested by these diagonals as well, especially as lines intersect and shatter the composition into slices and diamonds.

Context is easy to find for this image. Try searching within JSTOR. The creator, Andō Hiroshige, produced hundreds of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints like this one. As in many of these prints, the people are dwarfed by the landscape around them, and some techniques—like the fade from saturated to pale blue towards the bottom of the image—emerge as typical, even defining, elements.

Pine trees in Hakone by Andō Hiroshige, ca. 1850; Settsu Province - Demi Beach and Lighthouse - Sumiyoshi by Andō Hiroshige
Pine trees in Hakone by Andō Hiroshige, ca. 1850; Settsu Province – Demi Beach and Lighthouse – Sumiyoshi by Andō Hiroshige

This Edo period print, while more than a hundred and fifty years old, feels modern. The graphic and concise visual elements certainly lend themselves to this, but this immediacy may also come from the subject matter: most of us can relate to the experience of the people on Shin-Ohashi Bridge. We can recall the licks of cold rain on our legs while grasping for a hat, umbrella, or jacket, anything to shelter under. Imagining this feeling, the uneasy diagonal lines and sharp edges start to make more sense.

Beginning with an identification of the formal elements of a work and description of their roles in the overall composition helps us orient ourselves within the bounds of the work of art. Having considered the parts as well as the whole, we can more confidently connect the visual components of an artwork to what lies across and beyond the page, connecting what we see with what we know but cannot observe within the frame. We then interpret the work, not necessarily pursuing an answer or conclusion but rather exploring what emerges, having stopped to gather information and consider it both in parts and as a whole.

* * *

Yet, as A Short Guide to Writing About Art declares from the bookshelf of every undergraduate, “It is now widely acknowledged that when we look, we are not looking objectively, looking with what has been called an innocent eye.” No matter how earnest the effort, no formal analysis is ever an objective observation of form alone. So, let’s set aside for a moment the methodology of formal analysis and try a different way of looking at art. This time, we’ll look not with innocent eyes, but with our own world-weary, subjective ones.

Rather than eschewing our overall judgements, let’s dive in. This works especially well with artworks like the one below, those without much information available beyond the work itself.

Sailor With Mother by Henry Bacon, 1888
Sailor With Mother by Henry Bacon, 1888 via JSTOR

As I encounter this painting, I get a sense of quiet, familial closeness; maybe the central figures are headed home from a gathering as fall turns to winter in a seaside town.
After my observations, I can explore what prompted those initial assumptions. I inferred that it was winter based on the warm, muted colors. I noticed how both figures are walking in step with one another and how they almost become a single entity, their dark clothes nearly merging. This made me think the people must be very close. I noticed the blue on the horizon, assuming it was the sea, and buildings in the background, close enough together to be a town or maybe even a small city.

My initial reactions may not be accurate, though, so it’s time to dig into the details and any available context. Examining and appreciating works of art requires some effort. At the very least, you have to be open to new ideas and observations as they emerge. Consider, too, that when exploring a work of art, there is no correct—or even “best”—conclusion.

As I look more closely, I see that the central figures in this painting aren’t as alone as I initially thought. Two people are only a few paces behind on the path, also arm in arm, heads bowed together. On reflection, the central figures also don’t appear to be as close as their postures might suggest. The title reveals that they are mother and son, but other than the symmetry created by their linked arms, they actually seem quite distant from one another. The son, with a heavy brow, is looking at something outside the frame and seems no more interested in his mother than in the books he carries in his other hand. Meanwhile, his mother looks distractedly down towards the path. Even my guess that the picture depicts winter is probably not accurate: wildflowers and dark green foliage explode from either side of the path. The hay to the left and right of the figures looks freshly sheaved and sits atop still green fields, suggesting it’s more likely early summer.

My initial observations weren’t necessarily wrong, or not completely: familial closeness can take many forms, and it certainly does seem that the figures are walking away from town, leaving or maybe heading to some type of gathering. But reconsidering the image, I can see more depth, both in the central figures’ interaction and the world around them.

This time, we looked broadly and observed our reactions carefully, questioning and contextualizing them before comparing our initial assumptions to new information we acquired as we spent more time with the picture. By doing so, we centered our personal experiences of and interest in the work while exploring other possibilities through careful observation of the visual information available.

  1. Observe: What is your overall understanding of the image? What is your initial reaction?
  2. Question: Consider why you reacted this way. What made you think that?
  3. Contextualize: Do you see new details as you look more closely?
  4. Compare: How is your understanding of the image different now?

* * *

Visual literacy describes one’s ability to take informed steps to explore and evaluate visual material. In the previous eight columns, we’ve discussed a foundational component of visual literacy, visual analysis, and interpretation. Next time, we’ll begin exploring another: discovery and exploration. We’ll discuss how to seek out visual material, both known and new to you. In the meantime, keep an eye out for images that you don’t immediately understand. Does closer looking, mining the visual qualities for clarity and even meaning, help you better understand an image? While you wait, you could also catch up on the Learning to Look articles you missed.


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How to Interpret the Meaning of an Image https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-interpret-meaning-images/ Sat, 25 Mar 2023 12:10:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295900&preview=true&preview_id=295900 This week, we practice using our skills of visual analysis and learn how to "read" deliberately constructed images.

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We instantly and often subconsciously interpret the meaning of images every day without realizing it. Symbols and icons are visual shortcuts for a creator to communicate meaning and message to an audience. Beyond symbols, however, more complex imagery and visual relationships between an image’s various features can similarly produce meaning, though this meaning may be more open to interpretation.

In some cases, familiar subjects, contents, or contexts facilitate almost instantaneous recognition of an image’s message. When these features are less familiar, in other words when we are more distant from the original intended audience, interpretation must be a conscious choice. In this scenario, all that we’ve discussed over the last six articles—approaching works, mediumcontext, elements of design , principles of composition , and symbols—can be leveraged to interpret meaning and nuance through and beyond an image’s initial visual impact.

Visual analysis and interpretation can be used to approach any image, but here we examine images that are meant to communicate a particular message, not just to illustrate or adorn text.

* * *

Some images are created for a narrow audience, and the creator assumes that viewers will have only casual or brief interactions with the image. This makes an image’s meaning more direct and apparent. This admissions poster from Grand Valley State College is targeting applicants for their future teachers program. It relies only on line and greyscale to communicate with the audience. Loose symbols like the book under the figures’ arm identify this person as a student. There is a clever but simple visual construct that creates meaning for the audience: as the viewer, we are placed in the position of a prospective student, looking at a poster of a current student, looking at a poster of a future teacher. This poster tells the audience that the path to being a future teacher is through this event and enrollment in the program.

Admissions poster for Grand Valley State College future teachers program, 1972
Admissions poster for Grand Valley State College future teachers program, 1972. Courtesy of Grand Valley State University Archives

When an audience is larger, such immediate recognition of meaning often requires text and symbolism to support understanding. Attention-grabbing illustrated magazine covers are a prime example of this. Early Life magazine covers employ very different iconography and symbolism to communicate with their early 20th century audience, who would have likely made sense of the images quickly while passing a newsstand. In the first, portraits of William Howard Taft and James Sherman would have been as recognizable to the audience as Teddy Roosevelt’s signature glasses and the American symbols that create his mouth and mustache. While the message would have been clear to the magazine’s audience at the time, visual analysis of the image reveals to us the same message: after eight years as president, Roosevelt was staring down the future of America and his future out of the White House.

Life Magazine, February 25, 1909
Life magazine, February 25, 1909

Another Life magazine cover from 1909 takes a more abstract but no less recognizable approach to communicating its message. Rather than using direct symbols, it employs broader symbolic metaphors like bountiful fruit and long-living trees to craft a scene of enduring love. The illustrator’s choice to render the figures in soft pencil shades and to obscure the figures’ faces further reinforces this image of timeless, universal love. Such an image can be widely read beyond its initially intended audience, but closer investigation of its visual components reveals the deliberate, thoughtful choices made that allow the image to resonate so easily and immediately.

Life Magazine, May 20, 1909
Life magazine, May 20, 1909

As images are initially created with a particular audience in mind, sometimes we are too removed from that audience or context to easily interpret them. Meaning is shaped by factors beyond what is initially visible. While close looking can unlock some understanding of meaning and sentiment, contextual information is often necessary when the image’s intent is less immediately accessible to us. In this illustration from Harper’s Bazar, we can get fairly close to the meaning behind the image through close looking. The arrangement of the figures in both sides of the image allows us to quickly read these as a comparison or perhaps parallel circumstances. Even with limited knowledge of Western culture, the details and flourishes that abound in the left of the image reveal that this is likely a comparison between high- and lower-class women, a juxtaposition that the figures’ activities seem to confirm.

Without more information, this is likely as far as most viewers would get towards understanding this image’s message. However, contextual information in the image itself gives us a big hint. The captions read: “The long and short of it”, “short dresses”, and “long hours”, alerting us to the important features of the images. Looking again, we see that the central figure on the left is, indeed, wearing a skirt that reveals her shoes while engaging in some sort of social activity, whereas the central figure on the right is wearing a skirt that pools around her ankles on the floor as she sews. Now we have a clearer understanding of this image as a commentary on the dress of women reflecting their social and occupational status.

The Short and Long of It, Published in Harper's Bazar, August 1, 1868
The Short and Long of It, Published in Harper’s Bazar, August 1, 1868

Visual analysis and image investigation unlocks meaning in a visual work, but what if the meaning that we read into an image is not what the creator intended or what initial audiences understood? Especially with historical images, modern audiences may bring context and perspective to their analysis of visual works that the original audience did not have; their interpretation might be anachronistic.

The images we considered in this column were intended to communicate a direct and specific message, something not true of many images you might encounter in the real world. In the next column, we’ll explore how to analyze visual art and compare works’ visual components and context.

Develop your visual literacy skills. Follow the Learning to Look column here.


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What is a Symbol? https://daily.jstor.org/what-is-a-symbol/ Thu, 02 Mar 2023 14:00:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295899&preview=true&preview_id=295899 A symbol can be any object, character, color, or even shape that represents an abstract concept without explanatory text. But wait, there's more!

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What transforms an image into a symbol? In visual language, a symbol can be any object, character, color, or even shape that recognizably represents an abstract concept. The word recognizable is important here: any element in an image can be intended to be symbolic by the creator, but true symbols are things that do not need to be explained to be understood by the intended audience.

In this article, we’ll explore symbols through posters in several JSTOR Open Community Collections including the Claremont Colleges’ Twentieth Century Posters, SVA’s COVID Collection, Central Washington University’s U.S Government Posters, the Wellcome Collection, and more. In many ways posters are an ideal format to begin thinking about symbols in visual media. Posters are often used for mass communication, relying on symbols to quickly disseminate a message without the need for extensive or explanatory text.

Symbol ≠ Icon

One of the first things to know about symbols is that the words symbol and icon are not interchangeable. Whereas icons are simplified representations of items in the world that often have a one-to-one translation of a particular word, symbols represent an idea or abstract concept. Take the following two posters promoting boating safety in the U.S. The first uses icons in place of a specific word—an image of a fish stands in for the word “fish”. In the second poster, Uncle Sam is being used as a symbol to communicate a sense of responsibility and duty to associate boating safety with these ideas.

via JSTOR/JSTOR

Symbols frequently rely on different elements of design like color and shape to facilitate quick identification. The more widely understood the symbol, the more room for shape and color to vary before being unrecognizable. An example of this is general prohibition sign, a circle with a diagonal strike that indicates the abstract concept that some item or behavior is not permitted. This is such a widely used symbol that it can be applied in many different contexts and manipulated considerably before losing its symbolic meaning. In the images below, this symbol for “no” is applied widely while still communicating that something is not allowed. In the left image, the shape of the symbol is manipulated to look like a virus, but the distinct red color makes it instantly recognizable. This stands in contrast to the center image, where the color is now green but the shape is traditional and clear. Even in the image on the right, language does not stand in the way of understanding that viewers are being cautioned against the behavior in the photograph.

via JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR

Global Symbols

Symbols rely on easy recognition on the part of their intended audience, but that audience can often vary in size and scope, from relatively small populations, like the U.S. Army Materiel Command, to entire countries. The strength of a symbol is not necessarily the size of its audience, but its clarity and instant understanding.

via JSTOR/JSTOR

There are even symbols that are almost globally recognized. Often, universally understood symbols come from shared human experiences. One such symbol is a skeleton, usually symbolizing an omen of death or warning of deadly consequences. While the posters below depict skeletons in widely different cultural contexts, from New Delhi to Moscow, and various situations from war to alcoholism, the symbolic meaning of the skeleton can be read in much the same way without the need for additional information.

via JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR

One’s proximity to the original context of a symbol affects how easy it is to recognize. Symbols meant to be read and understood by people like us in similar times periods, places, and situations tend to be quicker for us to comprehend.

Some Symbols Have a Second Life

via LOC/JSTOR/JSTOR

Powerful symbols can even live more than one life. Sometimes when a symbol is closely tied to a particular meaning and easily recognizable it can be repurposed in new contexts, transferring its meaning from one situation to another. One widely recognizable symbol in American posters is Rosie the Riveter, a cultural symbol that became visually associated with a 1940s Westinghouse poster where a woman flexes her arm and declares, “We can do it!” Over the last eighty years, this image has been repurposed in wildly different contexts from banking to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite different contexts and visual details, the symbol has staying power and continues to express initiative, empowerment, and independence.

Symbols and Cultural Context

Often, as with symbolic color associations, a symbol will be present across cultures and time periods but take on different meanings. Sometimes, these symbols are co-opted from one group by another that transforms its meaning, the swastika being a notable example. More frequently, though, symbols simply emerge independently or are spread unintentionally, taking on different meanings based on the culture in which they arise. Dragons provide a clear (and visually delightful) example of this. The dragon posters below span approximately sixty years, but the difference in symbolic meaning stems from their cultural context rather than temporal distance.

via JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR

The first two seem quite similar at first glance: a mounted swordsman defeating a scaly dragon. Yet in the first, the red champion of socialist revolution is defeating a dragon symbolizing imperialist rule while the knight of the second is Saint George, the embodiment of faith and heeding the call to arms, triumphing over the devil in the symbolic form of a dragon. The third poster depicts a dragon that is visually distinct from the others. Here, the dragon symbolizes power, abundance, and China embodied. This dragon is not evil at all but rather the symbolic origin of the Chinese people and, at the time of this poster’s creation, a deliberately reframed symbol of good fortune in communist China.

* * *

Out of context, any of these symbols may be drastically misunderstood, but to the intended audience they form a shared foundation for visual communication and understanding. Recognizing the original context of symbols makes it possible to research and discover the intended message of symbols, unlocking their meaning for deeper understanding. In posters, this original audience is usually easy to identify based on text in and around the poster, but this is also true of investigating symbols in other contexts. Consider the amulet below and think about what your first interpretation of the symbols is based on your own culture and experiences. Compare this to the description of the symbolic imagery given in the metadata to the right of the image. What were the differences between your interpretation and the description? How might you go about finding more information to identify the symbolic meaning of the tiger that wasn’t mentioned in the description?

via JSTOR

 Are you an educator? Explore symbols in poster art with your students using this lesson plan. 

Further Reading

The Power of Symbols

Identifying Symbols

Iconic images, symbols, and archetypes: their function in art and science

Are you an educator? Explore symbols with your students using this lesson plan:

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Alternative text – include a link to the PDF!﻿


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Principles of Composition in Art and Design https://daily.jstor.org/principles-of-composition-in-art-and-design/ Thu, 09 Feb 2023 14:07:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295898&preview=true&preview_id=295898 An artist combines repetition, balance, proportion, movement, and other design elements to form the whole of a visual composition.

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In last month’s “Learning to Look” column we explored color, a delightfully complex element of art and design. Like shape, value, space, form, line, and texture, color is considered a structural component of visual works, a basic building block of art and design. In this week’s column, we’ll focus on how these elements are combined to create a visual impression or impact. We call these the principles of art and design or principles of composition.

The principles of composition emerged in the late nineteenth century and rose to prominence as a language to address the formal elements of early and mid-twentieth century abstract and experimental art.  While the number and grouping of principles of composition vary from source to source, they include some combination of the following:

  • balance
  • movement
  • rhythm
  • emphasis
  • contrast
  • repetition
  • proportion

(Unity is occasionally included as a principle that describes the overall harmony of a composition created by implementing other principles effectively.) By nature, these principles overlap and intertwine to form the whole of a visual composition. It’s nearly impossible to discuss one of these principles without referencing others. Let’s look at a few examples.

An illustration of two people riding camels in the desert. The camels are walking away.
Over the Old Route into Egypt, illustration for “Riding Down to Egypt” by Norman Duncan, via JSTOR

This painting by Lawren Stewart Harris (1885-1970) may be initially compelling in its imagery and the story it seems to tell. If you’ve read our discussion of color, you might notice how color helps tell the story. The violet smudges on peachy ground read quickly as evening shadows on blown sand. But these colors are working harder than that. In conjunction with other elements, such as line, texture, and shape, they don’t just tell a story of an evening ride through the desert. They tell us that it’s windy and that the figures are moving away from the viewer. Harris has used these elements to create a composition with visual interest through principles like rhythm and proportion. The proportion of the figures to each other—even the proportion of the pack animals’ hooves to the prints they’ve left in the sand—provide clarity of scale and indicate movement from the foreground into the background. The gestural marks used to suggest prints in the sand also create a sense of rhythm, the back-and-forth trudge of a journey on foot, the dance of wind across the surface of the sand brushing the prints away.

* * *

As they overlap and intersect, these principles of composition can initially be difficult to distinguish in representational images. Thankfully, artists, designers, and educators have spent considerable time creating works that illustrate these with simple, foundational elements. The Fleet Library at RISD’s collection of Arthur Loeb prints on JSTOR illustrates many of the principles of composition with basic shapes and colors using silkscreen prints produced by Loeb and his teaching assistant, Holly Alderman, while Loeb was a senior lecturer at Harvard University. As a twentieth-century leader in the field of design science, it’s fitting that Arthur Loeb (1923–2002) guide us through these design principles.

* * *

Two silkscreen prints by Arthur Loeb. The one on the left is a repeating pattern of royal blue hexagons, and the one on the right is a repeating pattern of softer blue hexagons with orange hexagons printed over them so that they partially overlap.
Two silk screen prints by Holly Alderman and Arthur Loeb, 1978, via JSTOR/JSTOR

Some of Loeb’s compositions are deceptively simple, like the pattern on the left, created from a single shape repeated and spaced evenly across a rectangular board. Yet even this engages the principles of composition. Here, the hexagons are equal in size and evenly distributed across the page creating a sense of balance, however simple. The hexagons are a vibrant blue, creating clear contrast with the white board that allows us to see the shapes as completely distinct from each other and their background. The repetition of these blue hexagons creates a recognizable pattern that one can imagine extending beyond the edges of the print. Note how a composition using just one shape and one color can be described through each principle of design.

The print on the right above was likely created with the same screens used to print the blue hexagons. While it introduces a bit of complexity to the composition, it also allows us to address a key feature of the principles of composition: they are more fully understood as pairs of opposites, two ends of a scale from sameness to difference. A composition can be balanced or imbalanced. It can have high or low contrast. It can be entirely composed of repeated elements or wholly unique ones. It could suggest dynamic movement or be completely static. Comparing the blue hexagons on the left to the overlapping hexagons on the right, we can begin to see how tipping the scales can change a composition dramatically. Contrast has been lowered in the composition on the right, creating a closer relationship between the shapes and their background. The additional layer of lighter, semi-transparent hexagons seems to sit on top of the blue hexagons, creating emphasis that didn’t exist in the flat blue pattern. This layering also coaxes the eye to dance back and forth between blue, yellow, and tan, giving the shapes a sense of movement and rhythm that the first print lacks.

* * *

These concepts can be applied just as easily when artists create compositions with greater variety in their colors, shapes, and lines.

A silk screen print by Arthur Loeb featuring five yellow triangles overlapping with five dark green triangles.
Silk screen print by Holly Alderman and Arthur Loeb, 1978, via JSTOR

Unlike the hexagon compositions, this image is devoid of overall patterns of equal-sided polygons. Balance is created not with equally weighted objects distributed evenly across the image but with a diagonal line bisecting the background. There is a lighter layer of shapes layered over an identical set of darker shapes, but this time they do not overlap the same way from shape to shape, interrupting the repetition and creating a more syncopated rhythm.

The following print uses very similar colors, shapes, and techniques but arranges them to create a new composition that engages principles in an entirely different way than the print above.

A silk screen print by Arthur Loeb featuring five blue triangles overlapping with several yellow triangles.
Silk screen print by Holly Alderman and Arthur Loeb, 1978, via JSTOR

Where the balance was created in the last image by an overall diagonal line, the weight of the shapes in this image is set slightly off center to the left, and balance is disrupted. Yet the movement we saw in the previous image is stilled with more consistent repetition, and a pattern emerges. If the first image was jazz, this one is a march.

* * *

Having seen how these principles come together to form abstract compositions through shapes and colors, consider the following image. This is a more complex composition than the Loeb prints, but the principles apply in the same ways.

An illustration from the book Woman in Modern Ornamentation featuring several elements of design.
From Das Weib im modernen Ornament (Woman in Modern Ornamentation) by Julius Klinger, via JSTOR

Shapes, colors, and lines are still arranged to give a sense of pattern, contrast, balance, and more, though now the shapes are recognizable as people and objects. In the largest, leftmost image, see how the repetition and placement of the green flower-like shapes create a sense of rhythm. The size of the small buildings compared to the larger figure puts emphasis on the person and creates a sense of proportion. Balance, movement, and repetition also factor into this image—on your own, consider how. Examine, too, the pattern samples to the right. How are these principles employed differently to take what is essentially the same motif—woman, object, woman, object—and transform it into unique compositions?

Are you an educator? Explore composition and design with your students using this lesson plan:

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Alternative text – include a link to the PDF!﻿

KEYWORDS: principles of composition, repetition, balance, movement, proportion, rhythm


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Elements of Design: Spotlight on Color https://daily.jstor.org/elements-of-design-spotlight-on-color/ Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:07:31 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=295123&preview=true&preview_id=295123 Color, like line, shape, texture, and the other elements of art and design, communicates meaning and creates visually compelling experiences. Here's how.

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Take a moment to think about your favorite color. Close your eyes and let it fill your mind. Why is it your favorite? Does it invoke a specific memory or item of significance? Does it call to mind a feeling or mood that resonates with you?

Color is one of several components of visual art and design known collectively as the elements of art and design. These elements vary from context to context but are generally accepted to include shape, value, space, form, line, texture, and color. Each of the elements  can be combined with the others to communicate meaning and create visually compelling experiences. While most of the individual elements must be combined into complex relationships to impact a viewer, color is has the potential to communicate independently of the others.

Color, for example, has the power to stir up feelings that are both personal and shared. In this way, color is perhaps the most accessible element of visual language. Without any experience analyzing visual works, most viewers can appreciate the way color impacts the reading or experience of an image or object. Color is seemingly self-evident and uncomplicated, yet color theory and its depths have enraptured philosophers, artists, and scholars alike for centuries.

A color wheel from 1895 via Wikimedia Commons

Color theory may be familiar to many readers through popular color psychology, which influences Western culture, from social media trends to government institutions. Popular color psychology is so pervasive that it’s often satirized. But pop color systems ultimately have very little impact on the interpretation of color in visual works beyond how popular color psychology has itself created cultural associations with certain colors (e.g., red signifies passion and purple projects power).

While the jury is still out on fixed psychological color relationships, cultural significance of colors and the visual relationship between colors outside of cultural meaning do have very clear implications on how viewers perceive visual works. This is as true of incidental color in documentary or archival visual material as it is true of artistic works and other intentional uses of color. Take, for example, the following image. The content, a city street, can be read easily in black and white. Yet when color is restored, details flourish. The separation between the red roof and blueish church spires becomes clear. The textural difference between the trees and shingles becomes distinct. The pale yellow that fills the sky and kisses the buildings’ edges fills the frame with a sense of rising sunlight that is illegible without color.

Heiligenkreuzerhof (Wien) via JSTOR

Color provides visual information here, enriching our understanding of the image’s content and perhaps calling to mind symbolic associations with key colors that are included. While color theory can become endlessly complex and often philosophical, anyone interested in visual exploration can begin to approach color on a handful of key levels:

1. Color can have visual impact beyond cultural associations.

While general agreement about color organization and classification was in flux for a large part of modern history, it is now generally understood that there are three primary, or foundational colors: red, yellow, and blue. From these are derived secondary colors—orange, green, and violet—tertiary colors, and so on. Different combinations of such colors are used to produce visual harmony or contrast, independent of any meaning applied to specific colors. When set against one another, complimentary colors—color pairs like red and green or violet and yellow—create a jarring effect, replete with contrast.

Two images from the SVA Covid Collection via JSTOR/JSTOR

Color can also indicate universally understood relationships, like time of day or fixed color associations that are widely recognized across cultures. Often, spatial relationships can emphasize or clarify these color associations. This makes it possible for viewers, regardless of experience or background, to quickly recognize otherwise abstract images like a blue rectangle above a green one as scenes like a sky and grass or water meeting at a horizon.

via JSTOR/JSTOR

2. Color can reinforce or clarify understanding.

Beyond adding a layer of visual interest, color often serves to reinforce viewers’ understanding of an image. Color echoes, and even sometimes exaggerates, what can already be read a scene’s figures and forms through both color relationships and culturally recognizable color associations.

Color can also clarify the way an image is read and understood, just as the addition of green to an image would distinguish a grassy landscape from a snowy one. Ambiguity in an image is often resolved and questions are answered with the application of color. In the image below, color declares that this is an image of fecundity amid volcanic activity, rather than an image of destruction. Here, color also adds identifying detail to abstracted plant and animal forms, identifying birds like the Hawaiian honeycreeper and O’u through distinctive coloring.

via JSTOR

3. Color can be symbolic.

On a basic level, symbolic colors can be created when a color is chosen and declared to have a particular meaning or association, like colors on a nation’s flag or the colors worn by a sports team. These can have a direct meaning that is widely recognized. For example, red, white, and blue are associated with the United States of America, and while various meanings have been ascribed to the three colors over time, the colors’ combined association with the United States holds significance in itself.

via JSTOR

When this American war effort recruitment poster was created, the red background, white nurses cap, and blue dress would have undoubtedly been chosen to mimic the colors of the American flag. The cuffs that cut across the image emphasize the relationship between national service, shared sacrifice, and patriotic duty.

At a more complex level, color can also be imbued with symbolic meaning over time within, or even across, cultures. Red brings to mind immediate and powerful symbolic associations in most cultures. While these are often flattened into overly simplified one-to-one relationships—red equals alert, passion, luck, love, risk—even one color in a single image can have nuanced symbolic connections, and these can vary from viewer to viewer, even in the same cultural context. A red health information poster could communicate a complex mix of danger and warning but also the promise of aid (e.g., the Red Cross), depending on the viewer’s experience and context. The red jacket of a pirate could suggest daring and bravery but also violence, depending on the pirate tales the viewer is familiar with. Red, in combination with other culturally significant symbols like flowers, could convey anything from respect and admiration to enduring love.

via JSTOR/JSTOR/JSTOR

Check back in a March for a column about symbols.

ON-YOUR-OWN EXERCISE

Consider the following image. Take a moment to examine color and how it impacts how you view this illustration. Is the use of color symbolic, culturally significant, or even compelling in itself? Without knowing the story behind the image, what can you infer about the relationship and nature of the two figures based on the colors used? What can you infer about their environment? What would be missing if the color faded to black and white?

via JSTOR

JSTOR further reading:

“He” Had Me at Blue: Color Theory and Visual Art by Barbara L. Miller 
A Critical Account of Some of Josef Albers’ Concepts of Color by Alan Lee 
Color Theory and the Perception of Art by Peter John Brownlee 
GOETHE’S THEORY OF COLORS by WM. T. Harris
Red, Yellow and Blue: The Historical Origin of Color Systems by David Burton 
Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History by Robert Finlay


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Exploring Images In (and Out of) Context https://daily.jstor.org/exploring-images-in-and-out-of-context/ Wed, 09 Nov 2022 14:05:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=292197&preview=true&preview_id=292197 When you think you understand an image, ask yourself what contextual information might be missing.

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By many counts, we live in an age of mis- and disinformation. Scholars and media alike recognize the necessity of vigilant appraisal of text-based information online and in the news. However, this same attentiveness is rarely afforded to images. Conversations around manipulation of information in images focus largely on content manipulation—where images, often photographs, are purposefully edited—but missing or misleading context, even when it is unintentional, can just as easily skew the interpretation of images.

Context shapes our understanding and interpretation of all the visual material we encounter. Context for images can take many forms, including accompanying text, other images of the same subject, and even cultural knowledge of the audience. When context is missing, obscured, lost, or forgotten, meaning becomes skewed and difficult to discern. Investigation into an image’s context can recover some of what is missing.

When presented with a single image, it is easy to draw conclusions about the subject matter based on what is visible within the frame, especially when the subject is unfamiliar.

The first step when approaching an unfamiliar image is to begin with close looking. This is followed by hypothesizing, asking, “What do I think I see? What might be going on? Why do I think this image was created? What visual cues have led me to these hypotheses?” Viewers tend to deemphasize the inherent uncertainty and speculation in this line of questioning when encountering images for the first time. They also rarely move past this step to seek additional contextual information, satisfied with the conclusions they’ve drawn.

But consider the following image.

Preliminary close looking identifies: a color image of a crowd of young people gathered around a picnic table, seated and standing. Some smile, some look attentively to the left of the frame. Textual information can provide more context: the title of the image identifies this as a divestment protest and the collection title points to Wellesley College as the site of this protest. Looking back at the image, the figures’ matching black and red attire and small buttons that read “DIVEST” corroborate the information provided in the title.

Seeking information in the image’s own metadata provides context in the form of a time and place that leads to further context: in October 1986, Wellesley students were engaged in protests urging their university to divest from investments with South African ties due to apartheid policies and practices in South Africa. Still, different viewers may interpret this differently based on their own experiences in campus protests or during apartheid. For viewers without direct experience with the subject matter, it may be difficult to draw conclusions or make connections with anti-apartheid divestment protests, generally.

It is impossible, however, to draw reasonable conclusions about entire historical moments, groups of people, or any subject based on one image. Nevertheless, single images are frequently used to define an event or illustrate a story, which can distort viewers’ understanding.

Even the October 1986 divestment protest pictured here, cannot be accurately described by one image. To make matters more complex: additional visual information can sometimes provide clarity, but it can just as easily confuse and muddle interpretations. The image below, for instance, paints a very different picture of this divestment protest despite being taken only hours before.

Here, the scene pictured might evoke the drama, and even violence, of other well-publicized protests. Most of the figures are faceless, except for the central figure. Viewers may be quick to read anguish and distress on this person’s face which the bodies lying on the pavement and the lurking police presence seem to confirm. Seen in isolation, this image seems to fit neatly into a familiar narrative of conflict and violence that viewers might accept without seeking context, because it confirms their existing beliefs and expectations confirmation bias. Even from just a few images like these, viewers tend to make initial assumptions about an event based on the first information they encounter and reflexively attempt to fit new information into their first hypothesis, even when it is contradictory. This is sometimes called the “Semmelweis reflex” or “idea rejection.”

It is essential, then, to continue investigating and seeking additional context before drawing conclusions about an image. Ask: “What do I already know about the context? What additional information would help me understand this better?” The answers to these questions vary from viewer to viewer. Yet each viewer must remember at every turn that the things they consider “facts” may themselves be assumptions warranting investigation.

While photographs in particular may give the illusion of veracity, they cannot be taken as a full and true representation of events themselves. As Alan Trachtenberg asserts, “Neither photographs nor the experience of them are innocent acts.” Approaching photographs critically and exploring their context can reveal nuance and even challenge assumptions made at first glance. Often, this means actively seeking out related images, identifying information, and texts on the subject to broaden one’s understanding beyond the original context where the image was first encountered.

Consider that these photographs were taken on the campus of a women’s college, Wellesley College, during the 1980s, a period of increased anti-apartheid sentiment and action in the United States and around the world. Universities like Wellesley were being confronted with student movements and protests pushing for divestment from investments related to South Africa. Context for these photographs extends far beyond Wellesley in October 1986, from other campus protests across the country back to the 1960s origins of this growing discontent with apartheid policies and their consequences. Context even extends past these events into the way they influenced and informed a legacy of action around divestment at Wellesley.

How does this added context clarify our interpretation of these archival photographs? What nuances do these images bring to our understanding of this era of political action? Reflect on these questions as you explore the images below and consider what additional context they provide to the images above.

1. Students blocking campus road in protest of Trustee vote on divestment, Wellesley College, October 23, 1986. 2. Part of a divestment protest at Wellesley College, 1988. 3. A flyer announcing a protest against apartheid in South Africa at a Chase Bank in New York City, 1977. 4. A placard reading “Sanction South Africa Now!” The placard is somewhat larger than an average human torso. 5. A student is arrested for blocking a campus road in protest of the Trustee vote on divestment, Wellesley College, October 23, 1986. 6. A student rally against University of Pennsylvania investment in South Africa, held by the Anti-Apartheid Coalition and 250 to 300 others. Photo by Ben Argov, Daily Pennsylvanian, University of Pennsylvania University Archives. 7. Anti-Apartheid Coalition members building a shanty on College Hall Green as part of the movement to secure Penn divestment from companies in apartheid South Africa. Photo by Marc Poulshock, Daily Pennsylvanian, University of Pennsylvania University Archives. 8. An “Abolish Apartheid” button. 9. Students being arrested for blocking a campus road in protest of a Trustee vote on divestment, Wellesley College, Oct. 23, 1986.

And, of course, consider what context might be left out of the images provided in this article. Always seek out additional context to further enrich and complicate this narrative on your own.

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Editor’s Note: This story has been amended to correct a subject-verb disagreement in the opening paragraph.


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The Visual Medium Has a Message https://daily.jstor.org/visual-medium-has-a-message/ Tue, 11 Oct 2022 12:15:00 +0000 https://daily.jstor.org?p=290568&preview=true&preview_id=290568 How does the medium in which an image is rendered, its materiality, shape our perception of the subject matter?

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What is the difference between a painting and a photograph?

The artist’s role as the creator of a painting is usually obvious. Even the most casual viewer recognizes the artist’s signature or the choices that must be made when putting paint on canvas. In contrast, many assume that photographs have an unshakeable veracity, that they capture the world exactly as it is. Yet, just as anyone who recognizes themselves in a family photograph can attest, photographs obscure or leave out just as much reality as they contain. As Alan Trachtenberg notes, “They are, we learn, vulnerable to exactly the same obscurities of other forms of evidence.”

The Medium Has a Message

Visual works, no matter what form they take, are subject to both the limitations and possibilities of their medium. Medium refers to what material a visual work is made of: the vehicle for an idea. This could refer to a general form, like sculpture or drawing, or a specific material, like marble or charcoal on paper.

By understanding how a visual medium shapes interpretations of a work’s subject matter, unique perspectives on the same subject begin to emerge, highlighted by the capabilities of different media or the expectations viewers bring to a medium.

Of Time and Space

Consider a photograph of a basketball player, mid-shot. Photography as a medium has the capability to freeze movement in time, to capture actions and interactions in a split second. Given this technical possibility, photography reflects a moment in a way that no other medium can. Yet this photograph is not a complete representation of basketball as a sport, this particular game, or even this specific moment on the court.

The photograph below, for example, seems to give a complete picture of the game: the viewer sees the ball, the players, the crowd, and the referee. Yet much is left out of the image, and hints of this can be found lurking everywhere. In the image itself, there are glimpses of what’s missing, like the shoes peaking up from the bottom of the frame that allude to someone just out of view. Most viewers see a player mid-layup and can infer what came before and after this moment in time, but a single photograph cannot truly capture this; it remains in the viewer’s imagination only.

Xavier University of Louisiana Men's Basketball Game Versus Tulane University
Xavier University of Louisiana Men’s Basketball Game Versus Tulane University

Photography’s ability to create a visual representation of something is not as restricted or limited to a single visual truth about a moment as it may seem. The creator makes many choices that lead to this image. The photographer of the image above could have made any number of minor or significant changes that would have completely altered viewers’ perceptions of that moment. A photographer chooses what to include in the frame and what to leave out. They choose the moment when they release the shutter and capture an image. They choose how quickly the aperture closes, deciding what the balance between detail and movement will be.

In the image above, for example, the photographer captures nuanced details about the player’s interactions and expressions from the sweat glistening on the central player’s neck to the anticipation on his teammate’s face. An understanding of movement in this image comes not from the photograph actually capturing movement but from the viewer’s familiarity with what likely led to—and followed—the moment when these players found themselves mid-air.

This stands in contrast to the image below, in which the movement and urgency of the player’s actions are prioritized over capturing clear details. Rather than freezing motion in time to reflect minute details of the moment, the photographer of the image below made the choice to leave the camera shutter open just a bit longer. The resulting image represents movement and gives an emotional impression in a completely different way than the photograph above.

1987 Bucknell University men's basketball game against Rider University
1987 Bucknell University men’s basketball game against Rider University

Other visual art forms, like painting, are not temporally bound. While both photographs and paintings are static and two-dimensional, painters can defy time and perspective to create a particular and deliberate visual impression.

Basketball Players by Barbara Zuber
Basketball Players by Barbara Zuber

The painting above, for example, may depict all the players in a single moment, just as a photograph would. Yet the medium allows the artist to show them improbably placed on a single plane, flattened and equal in size and importance. The basketball players are carefully positioned in a way that suggests movement, but this comes from their angled limbs and their music note-like positioning on the court. This stands in contrast to photography, where movement is inferred based on viewers’ understanding of the physical world and their expectations about how photography captures this.

The players in this painting are also viewed directly from the side, yet we see the court shrunken and upturned behind the figures. Paint provides the painter with opportunities to depict these basketball players in ways that photography and other mediums could not. Perspective can be manipulated and rhythm can be created through any medium, but paint makes possible this flat, multi-perspective depiction that emphasizes rhythm through contrast and repetition.

When visual experiences move into three dimensions, they communicate differently still. Unlike flat works, three-dimensional works like sculptures enter our space and interact with the physical world. They shift with the environment around them and reveal something new with each change in the viewer’s position. A photograph of a three-dimensional work can only capture one perspective of a sculpture in a single moment, but changes that emerge as one peeks around the corner or observes the sculpture over time can be easily imagined.

Ref.: Proposal for the Stuart Collection: basketball hoop: side view by Claes Oldenburg

In the proposed sculpture above, viewers would experience basketball from an impossible perspective, one which changes with the viewers’ movements and the seasons. From this sketch the net and ball may be quickly recognizable, but consider the perspective of the tiny viewers depicted in the image. Claes Oldenberg’s proposed sculpture gives the viewer the perspective not of an audience member or a player but of the fingertips of a player, just as the ball makes it into the basket. Where a photograph might seek to elicit the excitement of the crowd in a viewer, this sculpture would instead excite a viewer with the energy that would course through a player’s fingertips as they brush the hoop. This is an experience that only large-scale, open-air sculpture could create.

Different still is the experience of installations, works that are difficult to define but generally create an experience for the viewer in a particular time or place. Like a sculpture, Xiuzhen Yin’s installation, Prize of Desire (Basketball), can be viewed from many perspectives and with changing context.

Prize of Desire: Basketball by Xiuzhen Yin, 2003
Prize of Desire: Basketball by Xiuzhen Yin, 2003

Unlike sculpture, however, installations are not fixed or static. The basketball may roll, a shirt’s creases may settle. The viewer’s visual experience changes depending on time and place and, as with some installations, upon interaction with the items. Here, items like the basketball exist in the viewer’s world, at their scale.

A photograph allows the viewer to observe an image from exactly the perspective of the photographer, but an installation allows the creator to construct an environment in which the viewer has a singular, unique visual experience. A painting allows the viewer to experience many perspectives at once and share the painter’s impression of the subject, while a sculpture engages with a changing physical environment. Each provides a way to engage with the subject matter that another medium could not.

Consider the following images. Focus on what you can see and how the medium impacts your perception of the subject matter.

Photograph of Bucknell University men’s basketball player; watercolor of Basketball (Connvention Hall, Philadelphia); Cuban political poster 
  • What is unique about each depiction?
  • How do you think the medium chosen impacts these unique features?
  • How is your understanding of the subject enriched by each medium?
  • What is each work able to convey through their medium that the others cannot?

Want to learn more about using close looking to explore images? Check out Cultivating the Art of Slow Looking.

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