Electronic Monument

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Slowly learning: using KvL

I’m not so sure it’s that there are flaws in the education system… but rather that sometimes it just takes time to learn.  I feel that way with KvL’s material.  The more I live with it and work through it, the more I am learning (and hopefully getting “smarter”), but it is anything but a quick process.

After getting a few pages into this week’s reading, I decided to select an image, a photograph I had taken, and work my way through the reading with it, as opposed to my old strategy of doing the reading and then trying to use my new-found knowledge to analyze the image.  I think this might be a more productive route for me (especially as it keeps me from “forgetting” to consider a necessary part of the reading after the fact).

The image I chose is a photograph I took in the Summer of 2008 while visiting Oregon’s Central Coast.  It is a picture taken of my grandma while she, my sister, and I were walking along a trail to Oregon’s highest coastal point.  It happens to be one of my favorite photos I’ve taken of my grandma, actually one my favorite “vacation photos” I took the whole time I was out there.  I’ll stop there, though, with my narrative, and let the KvL material work us through what’s going on in the photo. 

1) The represented participant (my grandma) does not look at the viewer’s (interactive participant’s) eyes, which makes it necessarily an ‘offer’ – one that addresses us indirectly (119).

2)  It is framed in a medium shot, cutting the subject off “approximately at the knees” (124).  This creates a proxemic social distance that allows us to have a level of relational involvement with the subject but without extreme attachment.  The subject is standing at a lookout position (128) with scenery in the background, available for a highly-distanced examination by the viewer.  The subject is of closer relational importance to the viewer than this scenic backdrop.

3)  The photo chooses the angle for the viewer, and in this case the point of view is subjective, in that not every feature of the subject is seen (130)

4) The photo is taken at an angle parallel to the subject, increasing involvement with the subject (134), as opposed to merely being a spectator from an oblique angle.

5) We see the subject from a Backview.  This is where my interests in KvL’s thoughts were really piqued.  Their description of the photo of parents at first seemed to be a moment where they would be analyzing my photo, but I grew resistant to their extrapolation.  They argued that there was a desire on the part of the photographer to distance himself from his parents and their world (138).  Because I do not have a great desire to distance myself from my grandma, especially not at the time when I was on vacation with her, that description did not make sense… at first. 

    

What I then saw in their description of the “complex and ambivalent” backview is that there is a level of detachedness from the subjects – an amplified detachment beyond just not having a direct gaze, in that we don’t even see the eyes at all.  This is one of the reasons why the photo resonates so much with me – because this detachment paradoxically affords me (one who personally knows the subject) an increased level of attachment.  The backview provides me with a view of the subject (my grandma) as an independent, un-attached subject – a then-83-year-old person who was still taking her own pictures for herself while on vacation.

6) The perspective is from a low angle, but not too low of a degree.  This then creates a relationship between viewer and subject (140) that lends power and authority to the subject (something that works for me as a viewer, in that this is my grandma – someone who naturally I would be accustomed to “looking up to” despite being physically taller than her for some time).

7)  Her perspective/relationship with the other objects in the image gives her as the subject authority of the other objects that she is literally “looking down on.”   She is on the same level with the clouds, and thus has an equitable power relationship, with them, but the rest of the earth and sea are below her.

8)  This is a naturalistic photo with nothing “out of the ordinary” (like color, context, brightness, etc.) that might challenge “reality” so there is a very high level of modality (159).  There are sharp details and saturated colors, but nothing beyond what is socially accepted/expected of consumer-grade digital cameras – certainly nothing approaching the “hyper-real” (161) like some have argued (I think falsely) about the “Squirrel Crasher” image below – another standard vacation shot, though this time with some more-than-standard content crashing the party.

(CNN.com) 

I have liked this photo of my grandma since I first reviewed the “film” after the vacation.  I have had a hard time articulating why, though.  KvL’s discussion helped me work through it in a way that I think was profitable.  Perhaps I am learning, even if slowly.

Wowsers... KvL and some Terminology

(1962)

I kind of feel like I need to go back to Kindergarten... or rather, like I am going back to Kindergarten via KvL.  There's so much new education - learning how to count, which color is which, what a cow says, etc., - that I need to learn.  Well, maybe not those things in particular, but KvL surely prove that I am a newbie to their particular branch of education.  Like Sally got on her first day of Kindergarten, we too get some pictures via KvL, but what replaced the songs and the games was an extensive Vocab Lesson on how to describe these pictures.  I knew we would be utilizing specific terminology, but Wowsers - I had not prepared myself for this much "New Stuff."  

Using (a tiny bit of) the terminology provided by KvL, let's look at a press photo for the upcoming season of Survivor:

(CBS.com)

There are a number things going on here, but let's use KvL's language to unpack just a few:

1) There's a Covert Taxonomy (79) in that each person is posed in this "family photo" style, each shown as one of many contestants set against the typical tropical backdrop.

2) Each contestant is a Posessive Attribute (PA) of the Program's family photo Carrier (87).  There are three black PAs, 17 white; 10 men, 10 women; etc.  Each of these PAs shares the characteristic of physical fitness and lends a general notion of athleticism, aggression, and competition to the Program.  One can look at these "parts" as carrying their own PAs, such as tattoos, descriptive hair styles, etc., that may say something about them as an individual (Carrier).  

3) There appears to be a Symbolic Process in that the two PAs in the upper left corner appear "look out of place in the whole, in some way" (105) because of their posture toward one another.  Their matching heights, her dress, and their shoulder-touching inward turn, make them resemble two in a couples-photo.  This may be a nod toward the program's inevitable turn toward "alliances."  

That is a tiny bit of what can be done with the 30 or so terms introduced so far by KvL (44-114).  This post alone has taught me that like in Kindergarten, you often learn best by doing.  Just in this little breakdown of a Survivor photo, I have already learned more about KvL's approach.

The question remains, though, as to what happens if we don't adopt this language perfectly.  In math as a small child, if you don't get the basics of addition, subtraction, etc., it is quite difficult to  progress successfully into the next stage of the subject.  If I don't master the notion of Vectors, will I be able to really gain from KvL's further insights?  Is the terminology essential?  If it is, I hope I catch on quickly.

KvL and some Puppets

(1960)

It seems that Kress and van Leeuwen (KvL) seek to "clobber a few cherished beliefs" - like the verbal text is superior to the visual, and/or that the visual does not impose any limitations on how one reads it as a text.  Instead, they argue that "language and visual communication can both be used to realize the 'same' fundamental systems of meaning" (19).  Similar to as in verbal language, the visual contains structures and combinations of various regularities (i.e. a "grammar" - p20) that may at times remain invisible to the reader, but that still influence and guide the meaningful reading of the visual.

There are lots of different visual modes of conveying meaning.  As KvL point out, "each medium has its own possibilities and limitations of meaning" (19).  An example that came to my mind while reading this passage was Jim Henson's set of innovations that he brought to puppetry.  He got into puppetry not because he liked the artform, but because it was the most immediate way that he could get a job in TV - a medium that he found fascinating.  Once on the job, he saw new possibilities for sign-making in this new visual medium that others before him did not.  Prior to Henson, televised puppetry looked just like that -- a televised production of what was already being done, puppet booth, curtain, and all:

(Kukla, Fran and Ollie c.1954)

 Henson saw that there were many more "semiotic resources available" with this medium, so he made some changes when he started his first show:

(Sam and Friends - "Visual Thinking" 1959)

(I love the content of the particular Sam and Friends clip as it pertains to this discussion - the most famous remnant of that largely forgotten show).  The puppet booth was removed so that the characters could be seen as characters, not as puppets being controlled by people hiding behind a booth.  By removing the frame, Henson infinitely expanded their world, allowing for the inclusion of all sorts of semiotic "stuff" to happen.  


Part of understanding the grammar of visual communication involves recognizing how ideas or "things" are represented through a reproduction of "criterial aspects of the object" (7).  For the small boy that KvL mentioned, it was that "wheelness" was sufficient for "carness."  For Henson, in order to represent "life," the eyes had to appear focused.  Henson and his design team keyed in on that cultural understanding - the eyes are the window to the soul and all - and used it to communicate meaning (as part of what KvL would call the Interpersonal Metafunction).  By making the eyes slightly cross-eyed (their "magic triangle"), they were very conspicuously taking part in sign-making, making it appear that the puppet was focused on a particular point, an action that denotes life.

(Kermit and Henson)

These examples demonstrate that the "old" (?) belief in the supremecy of text is not a viable belief in all circumstances.  Puppetry is a very visual and very meaning-laden enterprise, certainly not merely an illustration of or addendum to verbal text.


I think I could go on for a while with examples from puppetry as it relates to these foundational beginning pages of KvL... but perhaps I'll stop at this for now.