Accueil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Rose_(geographer)
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/3685131/7cd0c5
"As Stuart Hall says:
"It is worth emphasising that there is no single or ‘correct’ answer to the question, ‘What does this image mean ?’ or ‘What is this ad saying ?’ Since there is no law which can guarantee that things will have ‘one, true meaning’, or that meanings won’t change over time, work in this area is bound to be interpretative - a debate between, not who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’, but between equally plausible, though sometimes competing and contesting, meanings and interpretations. The best way to ‘settle’ such contested readings is to look again at the concrete example and try to justify one’s ‘reading’ in detail in relation to the actual practices and forms of signification used, and what meanings they seem to you to be producing." (Hall, 1997a: 9)
Interpreting images is just that: interpretation. But my own preference - which is itself a theoretical position - is for understanding visual images as embedded in the social world and only comprehensible when that embedding is taken into account. As Hall suggests, though, it is still important to justify your interpretation, whatever theoretical stance you prefer. To do that you will need to have an explicit methodology, and this book will help you develop one." (pp.XXI-XXII)
"Every chapter here except Chapter 5 and Chapter 11 explores qualitative methodologies." (pp.XXII)
[Chapitre 4: THE GOOD EYE' LOOKING AT PICTURES USING COMPOSITIONAL INTERPRETATION]
"The image itself has its own effects. These effects are always embedded in social practices, of course, and may well be negotiated by the image’s audiences." (p.57)
"‘compositional interpretation’. This is a term I have invented
for describing an approach to imagery that has developed through certain kinds of art
history, and especially in relation to painting in the Western tradition of fine art. I needed
to invent a term because the method has tended to be conveyed by example rather than
by explication. [...]
Developing the ‘good eye’ of an art connoisseur requires much of a certain kind of what the previous chapter described as ‘contextual
information’. Specifically, you need a lot of knowledge about particular
painters, about the kinds of painting they did, about the sorts of visual
imagery they were looking at and being inspired by. All this is then used
by the ‘good eye’ to assess paintings for their ‘quality’. Thus compositional interpretation claims to look at images for ‘what they are’, rather
than for, say, what they do or how they were or are used. The ‘good eye’
therefore looks mostly at the site of an image itself in order to understand its significance, and pays most (although not exclusive) attention
to its compositional modality." (pp.57-58)
"Compositional interpretation has its limitations. Visual images do not exist in a vacuum, and looking at them for ‘what they are’ neglects the ways in which they are produced and interpreted through particular social practices. Bryson makes this clear when he adds two qualifications to his comments quoted above about the power of the painting. First, he says, ‘my ability to recognise an image ... is ... an ability which presupposes competence within the social, that is socially constructed, codes of recognition’ (Bryson, 1991: 65). Secondly, ‘the social formation isn’t ... something which supervenes or appropriates or utilizes the image so to speak after it has been made; rather, painting ... unfolds from within the social formation from the beginning’ (Bryson, 1991: 66). In its focus on the image itself, compositional interpretation neglects both socially specific ways of seeing and the visual representation of the social ; hence the fact that very few academic art historians use it unaccompanied by methods discussed elsewhere in this book, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis or discourse analysis. Moreover, compositional interpretation does not reflect on its own practices." (pp.57-58)
"Deleuze himself gave extensive attention to cinema, and developed a rich vocabulary for understanding its spatial, visual and temporal structures. Deleuzian methodologies for understanding film are thoroughly discussed elsewhere - for example, by Ronald Bogue (2003) and Patricia Pisters (2003)." (p.58)
"In art connoisseurship, a note is usually made of aspects of the social modality of its production: who commissioned it, why, who painted it, and what then happened to it before it ended up in its current location. The various owners and locations of a painting are known as its provenance, and discovering the provenance of an image will reveal the sites of its circulation. However, connoisseurship is more concerned to explore the compositional modality of its production, when it identifies the influence of other artists in a particular work, for example." (p.61)
"A method -iconography- whose aim is to decode the conventionalised visual symbols used to refer to such themes and events)." (p.64)
"All images organise their space in some way, and there are two related aspects of this organisation to consider - the organisation of space ‘within’ an image, and the way the spatial organisation of an image offers a particular viewing position to its spectator." (p.67)
"Michael Ann Holly (1996) has argued that it is this positioning of the viewer that is most important when thinking about how visual images have their own effects. She calls the logic of position offered to a viewer by an image its logic of figuration. In relation to the painting in Figure 4.7, for example, we can say that its logic of figuration places us low down in the painted room, inviting us to adopt a child’s point of view. In asking ‘what the work of art does for us’ (Holly, 1996: xiv), Holly argues that it is the spatial and temporal organisation of a painting which structures its effects most profoundly ; ‘legislated and predicted by the spatial and temporal organisation of the visual field: we stand where the works tell us to stand and we see what they choose to reveal’." (p.70)
"If the viewer is positioned by the image’s perspective to look down on it, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 140-
argue, they are given some sort of power over its subject matter ; if they look up to it, then they are positioned as in some way inferior to it ; and if they look at it at the same level, then a relationship of equality between spectator and pictured is suggested. They also look at other aspects of the spatial organisation of images, with distance, for example, suggesting that pictures of people in close-up usually offer a relation of intimacy between the person pictured and the spectator." (p.71)
"In the game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Prince is both the hero and the narrator, and the game’s structure follows the events he remembers ; as a result, the events and some camera positions are controlled by the game rather than by the player in order to align the player with the Prince (Figure 4.9). In contrast, the strategy computer game Ageof Mythology gives players an aerial view of the battlefield and the ability to instantly reposition as events unfold (Figure 4.10). These different external focalisations produce two very different effects." (pp.71-72)
"The second aspect of moving images’ mise-en-scene is their shots. Shot distance refers to how much of a figure is shown by a particular shot, and a shot can be an extreme long shot (where the figure is in the far distance), a long shot, or a full, three-quarters, medium, head and shoulders or close-up shot. Monaco (2009: 221-3) tentatively suggests some of the effects that frequent use of one or other of these sorts of shots might produce in a particular film. The repeated use of close-ups, for example, may produce a sense of claustrophobic intensity, while long shots may imply alienation and emptiness." (pp.74-75)
"The focus of shots is also important. Deep focus is when the foreground, middle ground and background of a shot - all of the frame’s geographical plane - are in focus. Shallow focus is when one of these grounds is more in focus than others. Shallow focus is sometimes used to direct attention to a particular character or event in a scene ; for example, in Oceans Eleven, again, there is a dialogue scene between the two main characters in which the focus repeatedly shifts from one to the other as they talk with each other. Focus can also be sharp or soft. Monaco comments that certain kinds of focusing may have particular effects. Soft focus may be used to create a romantic or nostalgic feel to a scene, for example." (p.75)
"The angle of shots also needs to be considered. The angle of approach, for example: is it square or oblique ? The angle of elevation matters too: it can be overhead (looking right down onto the scene), high-angle, eye-level or low-angle (looking up at the scene). The shot may also roll, which is when the horizon of the image changes its angle, although
Monaco notes that this is rare, since it disrupts the union between camera and audience that cinema especially very often tries to maintain. The point of view adopted by shots is also crucial to a film’s effects. The camera may adopt the point of view of a particular character, for example, and in Chapter 7 we will see what use Hitchcock made of this device in his film Vertigo. The reverse-angle shot is a particular case of the camera adopting characters’ points of view. It is very often used to show a conversation between two people: one is seen talking or listening from approximately the other’s viewpoint as the other listens or talks. An example of this technique was the conversation between villain (Robert De Niro) and cop (A1 Pacino) in Michael Mann’s Heat: their conversational confrontation in the movie was shot entirely with reverse angles so the viewer never saw the two men in the same frame together, an indication of the divisions between them perhaps. The camera may also adopt what Monaco (2009: 234) calls the ‘third person9 shot, in which ‘the camera often seems to take on a character of its own, separate from those of the characters’. In classic Hollywood movies, the opening point of view is very often a particular sort of this third person shot. It is an establishing shot, which works to give the audience the information they need about place, time and character before the narrative begins." (p.75)
"There are three kinds of shots possible when the camera revolves: the pan, when the camera moves along a horizontal axis, perhaps along the horizon of a landscape; the tilt, when it moves along a vertical axis, perhaps moving from the head to the feet of a character ; and the roll, which has already been noted. When the camera itself moves, the shot is a tracking shot if the line it follows is horizontal, and a crane shot if the line it follows is vertical." (p.76)
"In classic Hollywood cinema, and in many of its commercial products today, the principle behind montage is the maintenance of an impression of both narrative flow and spatial coherence. The kind of editing used to achieve this is known as continuity cutting. Shots are edited in order to allow the clear development of the story and to maintain a realistic representation of the spaces which the narrative occupies. There are many ways in which this is done, and as audiences of films we take many of them for granted. Establishing shots and reverse angles, for example, are seen as realistic ways of showing place and characters. Editing techniques like jump cuts, for example, when two completely unrelated images are spliced together, were rare in classic Hollywood cinema, because we do not perceive the world like that." (p.77)
"The jump cut is one sort of connection, or cut, that can be made between shots. It is an example of an unmarked cut, where one image ends and another starts. Other sorts of connections are the fade, where an image fades to black, the dissolve, which superimposes a fade in over a fade out, the iris, in which the image is reduced in size by an encroaching border circle, and the wipe, mentioned in the previous section, where one image removes another." (p.77)
"Monaco comments that a series of progressively shorter scenes is a technique often used to accumulate tension as a narrative climax develops." (p.78)
"The source of the sound can be in or out of the frame. Parallel sound is sound that is actual, synchronous with and related to the image. In contrast, contrapuntal sound is commentative, asynchronous and opposes the image." (p.78)
"Taylor (1957: 43-4) describes an image’s expressive content as ‘the combined effect of subject matter and visual form’. Separate consideration of expressive content is necessary because breaking an image into its component parts - spatial organisation, montage, colour, content, light and so on - does not necessarily capture the look of an image. Instead, what may be needed is some imaginative writing that tries to evoke its affective characteristics." (p.79)
"According to compositional analysis, some of the key components of a still image are its content, colour, spatial organisation, light and expressive content. Moving images can be described in terms of their mise-en-scene, montage and functionality. [...] A disadvantage of this method is its uninterest in the social practices of visual imagery." (p.84)
[Chapitre 5: Content analysis and cultural analytics. Finding patterns in what you see]
"Content analysis is a method of analysing visual images that was originally developed to interpret written and spoken texts. In one way, content analysis stands in sharp contrast to the method examined in the previous chapter. Whereas compositional interpretation is methodologically silent, relying instead on that elusive thing called ‘the good eye’, content analysis is methodologically explicit. Indeed, it is based on a number of rules and procedures that must be rigorously followed for the analysis of images or texts to be reliable (on its terms); these concern the selecting, coding and quantitative analysis of large numbers of images. It was first developed as a research method in the interwar period by social scientists wanting to analyse the journalism of the emerging mass media, and was given a further boost during the Second World War, when its methods were elaborated in order to detect implicit messages in German domestic radio broadcasts." (p.85)
[Chapter 6 : Semiology: Laying bare the prejudices. Beneath the smooth surface of the visible]
"Semiology confronts the question of how images make meanings head on. It is not simply descriptive, as compositional interpretation appears to be ; nor does it rely on quantitative estimations of significance, as content analysis at some level has to. Instead, semiology offers a very full box of analytical tools for taking an image apart and tracing how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning." (p.106)
p.113
-Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Londres, SAGE Publications, 2016 (2001 pour la première édition britannique), 432 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/2521496/58bab6
"
-Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography. The Limits of Geographical Knowledge,
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/3685131/7cd0c5
"As Stuart Hall says:
"It is worth emphasising that there is no single or ‘correct’ answer to the question, ‘What does this image mean ?’ or ‘What is this ad saying ?’ Since there is no law which can guarantee that things will have ‘one, true meaning’, or that meanings won’t change over time, work in this area is bound to be interpretative - a debate between, not who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’, but between equally plausible, though sometimes competing and contesting, meanings and interpretations. The best way to ‘settle’ such contested readings is to look again at the concrete example and try to justify one’s ‘reading’ in detail in relation to the actual practices and forms of signification used, and what meanings they seem to you to be producing." (Hall, 1997a: 9)
Interpreting images is just that: interpretation. But my own preference - which is itself a theoretical position - is for understanding visual images as embedded in the social world and only comprehensible when that embedding is taken into account. As Hall suggests, though, it is still important to justify your interpretation, whatever theoretical stance you prefer. To do that you will need to have an explicit methodology, and this book will help you develop one." (pp.XXI-XXII)
"Every chapter here except Chapter 5 and Chapter 11 explores qualitative methodologies." (pp.XXII)
[Chapitre 4: THE GOOD EYE' LOOKING AT PICTURES USING COMPOSITIONAL INTERPRETATION]
"The image itself has its own effects. These effects are always embedded in social practices, of course, and may well be negotiated by the image’s audiences." (p.57)
"‘compositional interpretation’. This is a term I have invented
for describing an approach to imagery that has developed through certain kinds of art
history, and especially in relation to painting in the Western tradition of fine art. I needed
to invent a term because the method has tended to be conveyed by example rather than
by explication. [...]
Developing the ‘good eye’ of an art connoisseur requires much of a certain kind of what the previous chapter described as ‘contextual
information’. Specifically, you need a lot of knowledge about particular
painters, about the kinds of painting they did, about the sorts of visual
imagery they were looking at and being inspired by. All this is then used
by the ‘good eye’ to assess paintings for their ‘quality’. Thus compositional interpretation claims to look at images for ‘what they are’, rather
than for, say, what they do or how they were or are used. The ‘good eye’
therefore looks mostly at the site of an image itself in order to understand its significance, and pays most (although not exclusive) attention
to its compositional modality." (pp.57-58)
"Compositional interpretation has its limitations. Visual images do not exist in a vacuum, and looking at them for ‘what they are’ neglects the ways in which they are produced and interpreted through particular social practices. Bryson makes this clear when he adds two qualifications to his comments quoted above about the power of the painting. First, he says, ‘my ability to recognise an image ... is ... an ability which presupposes competence within the social, that is socially constructed, codes of recognition’ (Bryson, 1991: 65). Secondly, ‘the social formation isn’t ... something which supervenes or appropriates or utilizes the image so to speak after it has been made; rather, painting ... unfolds from within the social formation from the beginning’ (Bryson, 1991: 66). In its focus on the image itself, compositional interpretation neglects both socially specific ways of seeing and the visual representation of the social ; hence the fact that very few academic art historians use it unaccompanied by methods discussed elsewhere in this book, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis or discourse analysis. Moreover, compositional interpretation does not reflect on its own practices." (pp.57-58)
"Deleuze himself gave extensive attention to cinema, and developed a rich vocabulary for understanding its spatial, visual and temporal structures. Deleuzian methodologies for understanding film are thoroughly discussed elsewhere - for example, by Ronald Bogue (2003) and Patricia Pisters (2003)." (p.58)
"In art connoisseurship, a note is usually made of aspects of the social modality of its production: who commissioned it, why, who painted it, and what then happened to it before it ended up in its current location. The various owners and locations of a painting are known as its provenance, and discovering the provenance of an image will reveal the sites of its circulation. However, connoisseurship is more concerned to explore the compositional modality of its production, when it identifies the influence of other artists in a particular work, for example." (p.61)
"A method -iconography- whose aim is to decode the conventionalised visual symbols used to refer to such themes and events)." (p.64)
"All images organise their space in some way, and there are two related aspects of this organisation to consider - the organisation of space ‘within’ an image, and the way the spatial organisation of an image offers a particular viewing position to its spectator." (p.67)
"Michael Ann Holly (1996) has argued that it is this positioning of the viewer that is most important when thinking about how visual images have their own effects. She calls the logic of position offered to a viewer by an image its logic of figuration. In relation to the painting in Figure 4.7, for example, we can say that its logic of figuration places us low down in the painted room, inviting us to adopt a child’s point of view. In asking ‘what the work of art does for us’ (Holly, 1996: xiv), Holly argues that it is the spatial and temporal organisation of a painting which structures its effects most profoundly ; ‘legislated and predicted by the spatial and temporal organisation of the visual field: we stand where the works tell us to stand and we see what they choose to reveal’." (p.70)
"If the viewer is positioned by the image’s perspective to look down on it, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 140-
argue, they are given some sort of power over its subject matter ; if they look up to it, then they are positioned as in some way inferior to it ; and if they look at it at the same level, then a relationship of equality between spectator and pictured is suggested. They also look at other aspects of the spatial organisation of images, with distance, for example, suggesting that pictures of people in close-up usually offer a relation of intimacy between the person pictured and the spectator." (p.71)"In the game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Prince is both the hero and the narrator, and the game’s structure follows the events he remembers ; as a result, the events and some camera positions are controlled by the game rather than by the player in order to align the player with the Prince (Figure 4.9). In contrast, the strategy computer game Ageof Mythology gives players an aerial view of the battlefield and the ability to instantly reposition as events unfold (Figure 4.10). These different external focalisations produce two very different effects." (pp.71-72)
"The second aspect of moving images’ mise-en-scene is their shots. Shot distance refers to how much of a figure is shown by a particular shot, and a shot can be an extreme long shot (where the figure is in the far distance), a long shot, or a full, three-quarters, medium, head and shoulders or close-up shot. Monaco (2009: 221-3) tentatively suggests some of the effects that frequent use of one or other of these sorts of shots might produce in a particular film. The repeated use of close-ups, for example, may produce a sense of claustrophobic intensity, while long shots may imply alienation and emptiness." (pp.74-75)
"The focus of shots is also important. Deep focus is when the foreground, middle ground and background of a shot - all of the frame’s geographical plane - are in focus. Shallow focus is when one of these grounds is more in focus than others. Shallow focus is sometimes used to direct attention to a particular character or event in a scene ; for example, in Oceans Eleven, again, there is a dialogue scene between the two main characters in which the focus repeatedly shifts from one to the other as they talk with each other. Focus can also be sharp or soft. Monaco comments that certain kinds of focusing may have particular effects. Soft focus may be used to create a romantic or nostalgic feel to a scene, for example." (p.75)
"The angle of shots also needs to be considered. The angle of approach, for example: is it square or oblique ? The angle of elevation matters too: it can be overhead (looking right down onto the scene), high-angle, eye-level or low-angle (looking up at the scene). The shot may also roll, which is when the horizon of the image changes its angle, although
Monaco notes that this is rare, since it disrupts the union between camera and audience that cinema especially very often tries to maintain. The point of view adopted by shots is also crucial to a film’s effects. The camera may adopt the point of view of a particular character, for example, and in Chapter 7 we will see what use Hitchcock made of this device in his film Vertigo. The reverse-angle shot is a particular case of the camera adopting characters’ points of view. It is very often used to show a conversation between two people: one is seen talking or listening from approximately the other’s viewpoint as the other listens or talks. An example of this technique was the conversation between villain (Robert De Niro) and cop (A1 Pacino) in Michael Mann’s Heat: their conversational confrontation in the movie was shot entirely with reverse angles so the viewer never saw the two men in the same frame together, an indication of the divisions between them perhaps. The camera may also adopt what Monaco (2009: 234) calls the ‘third person9 shot, in which ‘the camera often seems to take on a character of its own, separate from those of the characters’. In classic Hollywood movies, the opening point of view is very often a particular sort of this third person shot. It is an establishing shot, which works to give the audience the information they need about place, time and character before the narrative begins." (p.75)
"There are three kinds of shots possible when the camera revolves: the pan, when the camera moves along a horizontal axis, perhaps along the horizon of a landscape; the tilt, when it moves along a vertical axis, perhaps moving from the head to the feet of a character ; and the roll, which has already been noted. When the camera itself moves, the shot is a tracking shot if the line it follows is horizontal, and a crane shot if the line it follows is vertical." (p.76)
"In classic Hollywood cinema, and in many of its commercial products today, the principle behind montage is the maintenance of an impression of both narrative flow and spatial coherence. The kind of editing used to achieve this is known as continuity cutting. Shots are edited in order to allow the clear development of the story and to maintain a realistic representation of the spaces which the narrative occupies. There are many ways in which this is done, and as audiences of films we take many of them for granted. Establishing shots and reverse angles, for example, are seen as realistic ways of showing place and characters. Editing techniques like jump cuts, for example, when two completely unrelated images are spliced together, were rare in classic Hollywood cinema, because we do not perceive the world like that." (p.77)
"The jump cut is one sort of connection, or cut, that can be made between shots. It is an example of an unmarked cut, where one image ends and another starts. Other sorts of connections are the fade, where an image fades to black, the dissolve, which superimposes a fade in over a fade out, the iris, in which the image is reduced in size by an encroaching border circle, and the wipe, mentioned in the previous section, where one image removes another." (p.77)
"Monaco comments that a series of progressively shorter scenes is a technique often used to accumulate tension as a narrative climax develops." (p.78)
"The source of the sound can be in or out of the frame. Parallel sound is sound that is actual, synchronous with and related to the image. In contrast, contrapuntal sound is commentative, asynchronous and opposes the image." (p.78)
"Taylor (1957: 43-4) describes an image’s expressive content as ‘the combined effect of subject matter and visual form’. Separate consideration of expressive content is necessary because breaking an image into its component parts - spatial organisation, montage, colour, content, light and so on - does not necessarily capture the look of an image. Instead, what may be needed is some imaginative writing that tries to evoke its affective characteristics." (p.79)
"According to compositional analysis, some of the key components of a still image are its content, colour, spatial organisation, light and expressive content. Moving images can be described in terms of their mise-en-scene, montage and functionality. [...] A disadvantage of this method is its uninterest in the social practices of visual imagery." (p.84)
[Chapitre 5: Content analysis and cultural analytics. Finding patterns in what you see]
"Content analysis is a method of analysing visual images that was originally developed to interpret written and spoken texts. In one way, content analysis stands in sharp contrast to the method examined in the previous chapter. Whereas compositional interpretation is methodologically silent, relying instead on that elusive thing called ‘the good eye’, content analysis is methodologically explicit. Indeed, it is based on a number of rules and procedures that must be rigorously followed for the analysis of images or texts to be reliable (on its terms); these concern the selecting, coding and quantitative analysis of large numbers of images. It was first developed as a research method in the interwar period by social scientists wanting to analyse the journalism of the emerging mass media, and was given a further boost during the Second World War, when its methods were elaborated in order to detect implicit messages in German domestic radio broadcasts." (p.85)
[Chapter 6 : Semiology: Laying bare the prejudices. Beneath the smooth surface of the visible]
"Semiology confronts the question of how images make meanings head on. It is not simply descriptive, as compositional interpretation appears to be ; nor does it rely on quantitative estimations of significance, as content analysis at some level has to. Instead, semiology offers a very full box of analytical tools for taking an image apart and tracing how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning." (p.106)
p.113
-Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Londres, SAGE Publications, 2016 (2001 pour la première édition britannique), 432 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/2521496/58bab6
"
-Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography. The Limits of Geographical Knowledge,
