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Most images are produced, selected, and published in order to have a specific effect on readers and viewers. This dominant meaning of an image supposes that the audience will react in a predictable way, usually based on the widespread cultural codes that operate within a society. Images of elegant women in designer dresses, rugged men driving pickup trucks, stodgy teachers, cutthroat CEOs, hipster computer programmers, and so on speak to generally accepted notions of what certain types of people are like. An image of a suburban couple in an automobile advertisement washing their new car subconsciously confirms and perpetuates a certain ideal of middle-class suburban life (a heterosexual couple, a well-trimmed lawn, a neatly painted house and picket fence — and a brand-new midsize sedan). An image of a teary-eyed young woman accepting a diamond ring from a handsome man will likely touch the viewer in a particular way, in part because of our society’s cultural codes about the rituals of romantic love and marriage, gender roles, and the diamond ring as a sign of love and commitment.

These examples demonstrate that images can be constructed according to dominant connotations of gender, class, and racial, sexual, and political identity. When analyzing an image, ask yourself what cultural codes it endorses, what ideals it establishes as natural, what social norms or modes of everyday life it idealizes or assumes.

As image consumers, we often accommodate (i.e., passively accept) the cultural codes promoted in the media. For example, in the hypothetical advertisement featuring a wedding proposal, you might accept the producer’s communicated ideals that men should propose to women, that women are emotional beings, and that diamond rings are the appropriate objects to represent love and commitment. When you accommodate cultural codes without understanding them critically, you allow the media that perpetuate these codes to interpret the world for you. That is, you accept their interpretations without questioning the social and cultural values implicit in their assumptions, many of which may actually run counter to your own or others’ social and cultural values.

If you resist the cultural codes of an image, you actively criticize its message and meaning. Suppose you (1) question how the ad presents gender roles and marriage, (2) claim that it idealizes heterosexual marriage, and (3) point out that it confirms and extends traditional gender roles in which men are active and bold and women are passive and emotional. Moreover, you (4) argue that the diamond ring represents a misguided commodification of love because diamonds are kept deliberately scarce by large companies and, as such, are overvalued and overpriced; meanwhile, the ad prompts young couples to spend precious money at a time when their joint assets might be better saved, and because many diamonds come from third-world countries under essentially slave labor conditions, the diamond is more a symbol of oppression than of love. If your analysis follows such paths, you resist the dominant message of the image in question. Sometimes, this is called an oppositional reading.

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Negotiation, or a negotiated reading, the most useful mode of reading and viewing, involves a middle path — a process of revision that seeks to recognize and change the conditions that give rise to certain negative aspects of cultural codes. Negotiation implies a practical intervention into common viewing processes that help construct and maintain social conditions and relations. This intervention can be important when inequalities or stereotypes are perpetuated by cultural codes. A negotiated reading enables you to emphasize the ways in which individuals, social groups, and others relate to images and their dominant meanings, and how different personal and cultural perspectives can challenge those meanings. Without intervention there can be no revision, no positive social or cultural change. You negotiate cultural codes when:

Using this scheme will help you analyze diverse kinds of images as well as develop more nuanced arguments about the messages those images convey.