Book 2 - Reading Images

Notes
Introduction, by Julia Thomas

• Lucan - 'refers to this phase as taking place within the realm of the 'Imaginary', a term that stresses the connection between the image and deception' (pg. 3)
• 'Language and vision, it seems, are intimately connected, an idea promoted by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who argued that the process of differentiation at work in the act of looking occurs with the emergence of language itself.' (pg. 4)
• 'Such methods of interpreting the visual world were brought to the fore by critics like Roland Barthes, who drew on the structuralist ideas of Saussure to formulate a science of signs known as semiotics or semiology. Barthes 'read' social rituals like eating meals, or visual signs such as clothes or architecture..' (pg. 5)

Perspective, by Richard L. Gregory

• 'People living in the Western world have a visual environment rich in perspective cues to distance.. subject to the illusions which we believe to be associated with perspective.' (pg. 11)

The Look, by Rosalind Coward (If linking to patriarchy?) - More on this in the book, if I decide to go in this direction

• 'The dominance of the visual regime has been augmented by the media surrounding us. Film, photography and television all offer forms of entertainment and communication based on the circulation of visual images, on the sale of the images and the meanings conveyed by them.' (pg. 33)
• 'In this culture, the look is largely controlled by men. Privileged in general in this society, men also control the visual media. The film and television industries are dominated by men, as is the advertising industry.' (pg. 33)

Semiology and Visual Interpretation, by Norman Bryson

• 'Semiology approaches painting as a system of signs.' (pg. 89)
• 'The conception of image-making, with its key terms of schema, observation and testing, can be called the Perceptualist account, because the essential transaction concerns the eye, and the accommodations the schema must make to new observations coming into the eye.' (pg. 91)

Imaging, by Teresa de Lauretis (also linking to feminism further into the chapter)

• 'Cinema has been studied as an apparatus of representation, an image machine developed to construct images or visions of social reality and the spectators' place in it. But, insofar as cinema is directly implicated in the production and reproduction of meanings, values, and ideology in both sociality and subjectivity, it should be better understood as a signifying practice, a work of semiosis: a work that produces effects of meaning and perception, self-images and subject positions for all those involved..' (pg. 102)
• 'The term 'mapping', interestingly enough, is also used by Eco to define the process of semiosis, sign-making, the production of signs and meanings..' (pg. 105)