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Visual Literacy
Michael Lesy
| By now everyone knows that photographs do not tell simple truths. Especially if "truth" is defined as a state of certainty, a fixed point, euclidean, trigonometric. A point difficult to reach, but conclusive. |
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Photographs are different. Photographs are polymorphously perverse entities. Protean data. Paradoxical both/and creatures. They resemble Tweedledum and Tweedledee standing at the crossroads in Wonderland, pointing in opposite directions, rolling their eyes and grinning fiendishly while Alice, as earnest as a historian, asks in which direction the truth, disguised as a white rabbit, went. |
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The anthropologist Clifford Geertz talked about "deep structures" and "thick description," the pursuit of meanings beneath meanings, arrived at by an intense study of fecund particulars. "Doing anthropology," Geertz wrote, "is like trying to read a manuscript, foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries ... written not in conventionalized graphs of sound, but in transient examples of shaped behavior." The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in his heroic self-analysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, spoke of "manifest content" and "latent content." "Manifest," said Freud, is what the dreamer saw and heard, what he witnessed; "latent" is the "dream work" itself, its multiple meanings, condensed, displaced, transformed, and revised at the very moment, in the very act, of being remembered.1 |
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What if photographs were analogous to Freud's dreams and Geertz's "manuscript, foreign, faded, full of ellipses"? What if Geertz's "deep structures" and Freud's "dream work" alluded to the bones of meaning that move beneath every photograph's rosy skin? To dissect is every historian's temptation. But what if a photograph is wedded, form and content, aesthetic object and encoded information? What if the only way to understand a photograph fully is to see it whole, to respond to it empathically and analytically, to experience it in order to decipher it? |
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Early in the history of printing, the educated elite communicated complex ideas in books illustrated with woodcuts and accompanied by brief, enigmatic texts. Such images, with or without texts, were called emblems. Such images seemed to show one thing—for instance, a queen holding a sieve full of water, from which no water leaked—when, to those who had eyes to see, the images revealed something more, in this example, Queen Bess, Elizabeth Regina, England's Virgin Queen, whole but not intact, officially, but not actually, virginal. |
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Emblems, rebuses, picture puzzles—what if those arcane things were also analogous to photographs? Images, scattered with clues. Images built around symbols. Allusive images. Visual texts that have to be interrogated, unpacked, unfolded, opened up, and opened out.
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| The multiple truths embedded in a single photograph—public and private fears and assumptions, aspirations and convictions that lie just beneath an image's surface—are like the parts of a machine, waiting to be activated by a viewer's gaze. Blink once, blink twice, look, then look again, and the machine begins to transmit messages. |
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