Summer Reading: What Does it All Mean?
Originally published September 17, 2020
As designers and image makers, we create meaning. Whether commercial communications, documentary photography, or abstract art, the outputs of our labor are consumed and interpreted by its audience, who will seek to understand what it means. The message or meaning we intend, may not be what is received. To be effective communicators, we must have a knowledge of the principles of communication theory, and use them in our work.
Over the past few weeks, I dug into a handful of books in my library that deal with message and interpretation. These titles cover topics including semiotics, gestalt psychology, media ethics, reading photographs, and thinking visually. These range from visual books filled with illustrations, to dense academic texts filled with references to Plato and Schopenhauer.
Many of these titles are books I purchased along the way, with the intention that I might get around to reading them someday… which happens to be now. Whatever that means.
Visual Communication: Images with Messages by Paul Martin Lester (Wadsworth, second ed., 2000*)
I am not sure exactly where or when I purchased this book, although I suspect it was at Half Price Books in Berkeley in the early 00s, before I moved to New York City. It is a college textbook, used in communications and media programs. By using a soft cover and thin, coated paper stock, it is deceptively slim in its physical form—but clocks in at 402 pages. It sat on my shelf for some years; I finally got around to reading it this summer.
This book begins with a rather technical section on the nature of light, the human eye, and how the brain processes visual information, then provides an overview of theories of visual communication, including the sensual (Gestalt, Constructivist and Ecological), and perceptual (Semiotic and Perceptual); and a framework consisting of six perspectives by which images can be evaluated: personal, historical, ethical, cultural, and critical. The ethical frame is further subdivided into the categorical imperative, utilitarian, hedonism, golden mean and golden rule.
In chapters dedicated to individual visual medias, these frameworks are used to analyze and evaluate prominent works. These include typography (Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible), graphic design (Saul Bass’s opening title for “The Man with the Golden Arm”), informational graphics (the USA Today weather map), cartoons (“The Simpsons”), photography (Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”), and many others. The example cited for each category is used as a jumping-off point for a larger examination of the history, present (at the time of writing), and future of these mediums.
The example used for the chapter on television and video is the 1992 Rodney King video, which laid bare the brutal treatment of a Black motorist by Los Angeles police officers. The King video was a watershed moment in citizen journalism and racial justice. It sparked a violent uprising when the police officers who perpetrated the violence were acquitted by a suburban jury. I was 15 at the time, and clearly remember the horror of watching agents of the state brutally beat King. The grainy, verité footage revealed a truth I knew to be true—that cops abuse people of color with impunity—for all the world to see. Twenty eight years later, in the context of 2020, after the videos of the murders of Eric Garner, Philando Castile and George Floyd—the King tape seems almost tame. While King was on the receiving end of a vicious beating at the hands of state-employed thugs, he survived. Similar films today too often culminate in murder. Snuff films were once the stuff of urban legend—now they are far too common, and often star the police.
Of course, as a book written at the dawn of the internet age, the discussion of technology is quite primitive by current standards, and the examples of digital media almost comical—CD-ROMs, Hypercard, and the “World Wide Web.” [As a side note, it is amazing how poorly web work ages—the Gutenberg Bible is an amazing specimen 400 years later, but AOL on the other hand…] The author predicts “In the future, information highways will be as valuable and necessary for communication as backwoods trails, shipping lanes, telegraph wires, railroad lines, roadways, and airline flight paths….” While some predictions have come to pass, others like the author’s prediction of the “Teleputer”— a handheld computer/phone, connected to Al Gore’s Information Superhighway—are seemingly the work of techno-fantasy.
Except—are you reading this on an iPhone?
*As a college textbook, this book is updated frequently, and is now in its seventh edition. I am almost interested in getting ahold of the current iteration, to see how it compares.
Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski (MoMa, 1973)
John Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991. In this book, considered required reading for students of photography and curation, Szarkowski contemplates 100 significant photographs from the MoMA’s collection. Spanning a period from 1840–1970, Szarkowski’s selects images representing a wide range of subject matters and approaches: portraiture, landscapes, documentary, and aerial, to name a few. Many of the greats are here: Hine, Stieglitz, Evans, Weegee, Alvarez Bravo, Penn, Arbus. In some cases, Szarkowski has chosen a very well-known picture of the featured photographer; in others, he uses a lesser-known image to make a specific point. He was, of course, constrained to using images in the MoMA’s collection at the time of publication.
Underpinning each entry is an intelligent, rigorous examination of the photographic image. Szarkowski introduces each photographer, the times they lived in, perhaps the method or equipment they used. He examines each image from visual and contextual perspectives and analyzes how the two are often intertwined.
Szarkowski provides us as viewers with a template for looking carefully at images using all our capacities and intellect, considering how the photographer’s intentions come to bear on the resulting image. But he also suggests leaving room for the wonder and imagination that comes with regarding and interpreting art.
How to Read a Photograph: Lessons from Master Photographers by Ian Jeffrey (Abrams, 2008)
Although it appears to cover similar ground as Looking at Photographs, this book is a deeper look into the history of photography, and its most significant practitioners. Running to nearly 400 pages, How to Read a Photograph looks at multiple images from each featured photographer, to tell a wider story about individual photographers, movements, and photography writ large. Unlike Szarkowski, Jeffrey is not bound to a particular collection, and includes a wider range of photographers.
Each entry is runs across multiple spreads, and features several examples of the photographer’s images. A short biography begins each section, and extended captions accompany each photograph, providing both and contextual analysis.
My one complaint about this book is that for all the images that are included, many are quite small—I found it necessary to seek some of the photographs out on the internet to view at larger sizes.
This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics by Sean Hall (Laurence King, second ed., 2012)
This is the third time I have read this book, and it never fails to disappoint. In easily digestible chunks consisting of a concept introduced with an example on one side of a page (e.g. ‘What does this drawing represent’ over an illustration of a what could be an elephant having been swallowed by a snake—or a hat), with an exploration of the idea overleaf, and why we may interpret it as we do, Hill touches on many aspects of semiotics, signs, meaning, conceptual, visual and textural structures, interpretation, meaning, and storytelling.
While giving a top-level overview of these phenomenon, the book also drills down into the subject matter deeply enough to touch the bedrock of human communication. Of course, in order to properly decode that sentence, you would have to be familiar with metaphor, mining, and geology to make sense of it—because this meant that…
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (Harper Perennial, 1993)
I was never a devotee of comic books. Even as an red-blooded American boy (often the prime audience for comics), I didn’t really get into the whole superhero/fantasy thing. I did read some graphic novels in the “Sin City” series, but that was in a very dark period of my… OH HI! Where were we… Um, right—about this book—it was assigned reading in a grad school course I took, taught by the brilliant (and very chic!) Veronique Vienne. I remember reading it at the time—quickly—as one does with the obligations of grad school and such. This time, I took a bit longer to reread and absorb its contents.
McCloud, an accomplished cartoonist in his own right, uses the visual language of comics to make the argument that comics and cartoons are a serious art form, and deserve to be considered alongside other prominent art and media. While I may not fully buy that thesis due to my own biases, McCloud does give some stellar examples and explanations which can be readily applied to other forms of art and design, and add to a greater understanding of the creation of meaning and visual storytelling. These include semiotics (pictures are “received” information, while writing is “perceived” information, and requires previous knowledge of signs in the form of letters and words); the nature of pictorial abstraction; gestalt theory; and what he calls the “six steps” of creative mastery: idea/purpose, form, idiom, structure, craft, and surface—steps, which oddly, most practitioners of an artform take in reverse order as they develop. By using the format of a graphic novel, McCloud is able to literally illustrate the ideas he is writing about (no pun intended). His writing and drawing is clear, and the concise nature of the comic format makes this a relatively quick read.
Visual Thinking by Rudolph Arnheim (University of California, 1969)
I purchased Visual Thinking some years ago, and it sat on my shelf, unread, collecting dust, spine fading over time, until I finally took the opportunity to dive in and read it over the past few weeks.
This is a very dense, dry academic treatise on the nature of vision as it relates to thought. Arnheim’s thesis—if I read it correctly—is that most, if not all, human thinking happens in the form of pictures, rather than words. However, over the centuries, words have supplanted pictures as the dominant method for transmitting concepts and ideas between people and thus verbal and communication has become more valued in philosophy and academia. Arnheim argues that because much of thought is visual, perception is as valuable as abstraction in cognitive and intellectual operations.
Drawing on sources as far back as Plato and De Vinci, and modern philosophers, psychologists and scientists, Arnheim paints a compelling argument that to become better at thinking, we should become better at perceiving. He writes at length about the relation, and differences, between perception and abstraction, intuition and intellect, selection and generalization. His argument is buttressed with examples from art and design, along with studies on how children perceive shapes and draw from memory. A work of art, Arnheim proposes, “is an interplay of vision and thought … Percept and concept, animating and enlightening one another, are revealed as two aspects of one and the same experience.”
Another argument relevant to design that Arnheim presents is how a network or system is best described. Trying to verbally explain the way a number of nodes connect to form a system would be trying—at best one would end up with a string of words and representational letters that read as a complex algebraic equation, and are about as confusing. Drawing the same network as a diagram, allowing it to be perceived visually, showing rather than telling, and the connections are obvious at a glance.
The Medium is the Massage: A Catalog of Effects by Marshall McLuhan with Quentin Fiore (Ginko Press, 2001. original ed. 1967)
This classic text analyzing how new medias effect societies, was written at the height of the rise of television in the mid-Sixties. Often erroneously referred to “The Medium is the Message,” this book is one that I return to fairly frequently, as we navigate a world in the convulsions of nearly constant media upheavals: cable news, computers, the internet, smartphones, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, VR, AR, enhanced glasses…
As McLuhan wrote “Medium” during the television age, when a small number of networks broadcast similar content, many of his observations and postulations are based around a mass convergence, by which a wide audience is exposed to a and bound by single stream of images and information. Such a mono-stream also afforded exposure to groups and causes that had hitherto been hidden from popular view. It is no coincidence that the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s coincided with the popular adoption of television. Says McLuhan: “In an electronic information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other.” While this may have been true in 1967, by 2020, a new reality is upon us: the fragmentation of electronic media, particularly algorithmically-driven social media, has siloed citizens into narrow groups often defined by incestuous thinking and narrow views that reinforce our partialities and prejudices, rather than eroding them.
It is a shame that McLuhan, who died in 1980, is not still with us. The current media environment could certainly use a massage.
