Assignment 2

What images mean …….

The purpose of the assignment is to see how experimenting with images and objects can

be used as a research method.

Therefore in this assignment we were asked for it to be completed in groups. My group consisted of three people that we were to choose ourselves. We were given this assignment to test a theory by conducting an experiment. To do this we had to collect four random images and interact with others this could be members of the public. The theory is based on polysemy which is the idea that images mean more than one thing, but that text fixes the meaning.

Activity 2A.

Before starting the assignment we were asked to read The Rhetoric of the Image by Roland Barthes. We read this individually whilst taking notes then came together as a group and discussed what we thought.  I personally found this quite a difficult read and so did the rest of my group therefore when discussing Barthes as a group we decided to read the summary posted by Jonathan Baldwin.

We discussed the summary along with the notes we had taken from Barthes chapter and came to some understanding. Barthes talks along the lines of advertising and suggests the meaning of polysemy is images that have more than one meaning. Once one meaning is understood it gives you clues to other meanings and so on. When you read into these images you are therefore able to rule out some meanings and keep others, giving you a different overall meaning. However when you add text to and image it fixes a meaning to the image and the reader has no choice but to follow this word. 

Jonathan gave us a good example of the three messages an images gives. The example was a person wearing a scarf.

Someone could imagine he/she to be cold - this is a non-encoded message

Someone imagines it to be for fashion – this is an encoded message

Finally, someone points out the designer label – this is a linguistic message.

After reading this and not having it related to just advertising we found it much easier to understand as a group and were then able to carry out the next part of the assignment.

Activity 2B.

We were asked to find three images that have no text on them. They had to be photographs, not drawings, but they could be colour or black and white. We choose our images from stock.xchng.

These were our three images ......

Activity 2C.

We asked family and friends to look at the images and tell us what is going on in them. We then asked them try to produce a story that links all three images. We were told not to sequence the images for them – let them put them in their own order.  For each person, we asked them to write down their story, along with key information about themselves – for example, age, gender, occupation and so on.

This is where is became interesting, we each asked three people each. Here are some of  their stories……

1.“the giraffe went for a swim then went and picked his girlfriend some flowers.”

2.“the giraffe is very sad and confused so he goes to the cliff and jumps off, but then he ends up in the field with flowers and is very happy.”

3.“The children go to see the giraffe at a zoo and it starts to chase them across the grassy area. They started to come closer to the edge of a cliff. There was a beautiful waterfall in site at the bottom of the cliff .  The children had no choice but to jump.”

4.“The giraffe is looking and listening. He sees the green grass with the yellow flowers blowing in the wind. He can hear the waterfalls rushing down the mountain side, he pricks up his it quite loud. But he is happy that he can see so far because he is so tall.”

5. “she met a giraffe looking for something to drink.  Just then they heard a loud noise and saw the dam bursting under the pressure. ‘oh well’ said the giraffe, ill just have something to eat instead.”

After reading through all nine of the stories we felt this was plenty of information gathered as pretty much all the stories were running along the same lines talking about the giraffe listening and eating.

Activity 2D.

For our target story we chose story 4. from activity 2C.  We now had to add a fourth image so that everyone we showed the images to will come up with the same (or similar) story. The fourth image was a pair of binoculars which we tried to give the impression of the giraffe ‘looking’. We asked a different group of people to interpret the images.

This was the fourth image and the a couple of the stories we gathered  ……

1.“a gentleman decides one spring day to go sightseeing and stumbles across a lost giraffe who appears searching for food by some cliffs.”

2. “Walking along the cliff edge with the waves crashing below, looking inland with binoculars I see a giraffe chewing some flowers in the distance.”

We found at this point we were confused with Barthes as we found the idea of polysemy wasn’t working for us as well by adding the fourth image. This was because two participants added in another character and another added in themselves into the story. However we were in two minds about Barthes as the rest of the story was similar to no.4 in task 2C as they still managed to talk about the giraffe eating. 

Acivity 2E.

We were then asked to return to your original three images and this time add one word to one of the pictures. We added the word ‘Listen’ as this was the part people were missing out by using the image of binoculars.  This was one of the stories we got after adding the word.

1.“the flowers which are in the swiss alps also have a waterfall which is similar to the niagrafalls. The giraffe has been looking and listening out for his friend coming back from the waterfall.”

We found this task worked better as the stories went back to mentioning the giraffe listening.  We agreed with Barthes with adding text to an image fixes the meaning of a photo and therefore pushes the reader to follow down a similar path and allows others to take the same message from the photo.

Conclusion.

We came to a conclusion that the experiment does work and has agreed with Barthes. By doing this experiment it has made me clearer on the understanding of polysemy. Linking this back to my discipline of an interior designer I feel this works in the same way as by changing the atmosphere of a room it would create different moods for he client. For example if a room with no windows, to having windows to then having mainly clear glass as walls would create something different every time. So when a client walked into a room of either of those types it would be sending out a different message.