Chapter 3. test

true

Tutorials on Reading Visuals

Reading Visuals: Context

false

Reading Visuals: Context

Authors:

Cheryl E. Ball, Wayne State University, and Kristin L. Arola, Michigan Technological University

Activity Objective:

In this tutorial, you will explore the importance of context in constructing meaning about visual texts.

Click the forward and backward arrows to navigate through the slides. You may also click the above outline button to skip to certain slides.

A poster shows a man with a moustache wearing a suit and holding a small altoids mint box. The poster reads Freeze. Altoids, the curiously strong mints.

Context is additional information about a text, such as where it is located, how it is meant to be read, or what surrounds it. When we say a sentence has been taken “out of context,” we usually mean that someone has misrepresented a piece of text by ripping it out of a larger, more complicated work. The same can be said of many visual texts that we encounter. Context is a broad concept—it also includes the cultural knowledge that an audience brings to a visual text.

A photo shows the altoids ad poster stuck on a stop sign on the side of the road. The sign reads „Freeze“.

Where a picture is seen—for example, in the pages of People magazine, in the Wall Street Journal, on the wall of an art gallery, or on the wall of a bus station—is part of its context, and helps us puzzle out its purpose.

A poster shows a man with a moustache wearing a suit, holding a small altoids mint box. The text below reads Curious people storms altoids headquarters in search of mints.

What surrounds the picture—captions, headlines, images, or nothing at all—is also an important part of its context.

The text reads, ‘Altoids is a 200-year-old English mint, now marketed in metal tins by Kraft's Callard and Bowser-Suchard unit, that became an American candy icon in the late 1990's through quirky ad images and one-liners on bus shelters, billboards, subway plac-ards, and targeted print ads. The nationwide campaign debuted in the United States in 1995, although the candy was first sold here in 1918. It is now said to have a. 25 percent share of the candy mint market.’ The source is Beth Cox, Internet Advertising.

Knowing more about how the text came to be—in this case, the history of the ad campaign—is also part of its context.

The photo shows a man wearing a suit and a bow tie. He is smiling and showing a badge. A chalk outline of a dead body is shown on the floor and carpet in the background.

The Altoids ad relies on some shared knowledge, or cultural context, from its audience. We recognize the convention of the detective flashing his badge as Leslie Nielsen does in this still from The Naked Gun 2½—in the Altoids ad, the badge becomes a mint tin. We also read the Altoids ad in the context of parody, part of the current trend to make fun of cheesy 70s detectives.

A photo shows a man sitting behind a barbed wire fence with a small boy. Both of them are sitting on a sandy ground. The man is holding the child close to him and has placed his hand over the child’s forehead as to comfort him. The child is barefoot and his shoes are shown at a distance. The man is wearing a head bag. A button on the left corner reads “Enlarge” and shows a plus icon.

Captions can sometimes be seen as “transparent” context—we tend to think that the words that run with an image explain, truthfully, what the picture is showing. But we need to analyze context as carefully as we look at what’s going on in the visual text itself. Without any accompanying information, this photograph shows a man with a bag over his head, holding a child close behind a concertina-wire fence. We might assume, because of the wire, that they are being held prisoner, but we need a caption for context.

Now, let’s look at two different captions that ran with this same image on two different news sites—the American MSNBC and the British BBC—in April 2003, during the U.S. war with Iraq.

This caption reassures us: The man is comforting his son; he’s at a “regroupment center” (not a prison camp); the U.S. military is treating this family with consideration and kindness.

An Iraqi man comforts his 4-year-old son at a regroupment center for POWs of the 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf, Iraq, on March 31. The man was seized in An Najaf with his son, and the U.S. military did not want to separate father and son.

This caption leaves much open to the imagination, and we may imagine that the child is in dire need of assistance. We may feel concerned about how American troops are treating Iraqi prisoners.

On Monday, the International Red Cross for the first time visited Iraqi prisoners, but did not comment on their condition.

A textbox is shown with sections A and B. Section A reads, An Iraqi man comforts his 4-year-old son at a regroupment center for POWs of the 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf, Iraq, on March 31. The man was seized in An Najaf with his son, and the U.S. military did not want to separate father and son. Section B reads, On Monday, the international Red Cross for the first time visited Iraqi prisoners, but did not comment on their condition.

Why might these two organizations have given the same image such different contexts? MSNBC is an American news source, for an American audience. The BBC is a British news source for a world audience. Both captions might be completely accurate—but context is more than a caption, as this example shows.

An advertisement for Absolute vodka shows chairs arranged in the shape of a bottle. The caption reads Abolute AA.

Here is a parody of the Absolut ad campaign put together by Adbusters. To read it critically, you have to recognize layers of context: for Absolut, for A.A., and for Adbusters. Essentially the same question follows four times, each time with another layer of context that adds to your reading of the ad.

Use the space below to answer the following questions.

Without looking at any additional context, what can you say about this parody? What is being “sold”? Who is the intended audience? Is this an effective ad?