Kindle Notes & Highlights
However, when you are sensing, only your brain is engaged with the outside world—your mind hasn’t registered what it is you are sensing. Think of sensing as a camera without a memory card; that is, there is no mental processing of the image during this phase of visual perception.
Sensing
Sensing without selecting will often lead to mistakes in perceiving.
Hauer starts his speech with, “I’ve seen things …” and ends with his touching last words when he confesses, “All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Memory happens when you think about pictures using words and images.
However, to manipulate a photograph, particularly one with such historical and long-term value for a purely commercial reason, is the height of unethical behavior.
The process of sensing, selecting, and perceiving takes a curious, questioning, and knowledgeable mind.
The goal should be to produce powerful pictures so that the viewer will remember their content. Images have little use if a viewer’s mind doesn’t use them.
Without considering the image, you will not gain any understanding or personal insights. The picture will simply be another in a long line of forgotten images.
The more you know, the more you see.
The more you know, the more your eyes and brain will sense. The more you sense, the more your mind will select. The more you select, the more you will understand or perceive what you are seeing. The more you perceive, the more you remember, as the images become a part of your long-term memory. The more you remember, the more you learn because you compare new images with those stored in your mind. The more you learn, the more you know. And the more you know, the more you will sense, which starts the circle spinning around again. For clear seeing and knowing, this circle is in constant motion
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The circle/cycle of seeing
visual cues, theories, persuasion, stereotypes, and analysis—all make the point expressed by Aldous Huxley that it is the mind—not the eyes—that understands visual messages.
In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you. Deepak Chopra, 1946– AUTHOR, PHILOSOPHER, PHYSICIAN
When we want to learn the truth, we say, “Bring light on the subject.” After a revelation of some truth, we have “seen the light.” If we are concerned that we are not getting the full story, we complain, “Don’t keep me in the dark.”
Light can intrigue, educate, and entertain, but nowhere is light so exquisitely expressed as through color.
A theory is not cut in stone; it is not a fact. As such, a theory should be questioned and rigorously defended without passion and with an open-minded attitude from both sides so that the exchange leads to its improvement, rejection, or elevation to an established fact.
Those who advocate the sensory theories (gestalt and constructivism) maintain that direct or mediated images are composed of light objects that attract or repel us.
Wertheimer concluded that the eye merely takes in all the visual stimuli, whereas the brain arranges the sensations into a coherent image. Without a brain that links individual sensory elements, the phenomenon of movement would not take place. His ideas led to the famous statement: The whole is different from the sum of its parts.
Gasalt theory
In other words, perception is a result of a combination of sensations and not of individual sensory elements.
Visual interest comes from dissimilarity, not similarity
The work of gestalt theorists clearly shows that the brain is a powerful organ that classifies visual material in discrete groups. What we see when looking at a picture is modified by what we are directed to see or miss by photographers, filmmakers, and graphic designers.
All signs must be learned, but the speed of comprehension of each type of sign varies. Thinking about iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs is a way to really look and study a visual message in a much more thorough and critical manner.
its visual display, but kept the crawl along the bottom of the screen. Dissonance can also happen if a room is too warm or too cold, if there is a personal matter that you cannot stop thinking about, or if there are too many road sign advertisements competing for your attention on a highway. Too many distractions and
Linking sexual activity with products is a long-established tactic for advertisers.
Persuasion uses factual information and emotional appeals to change a person’s mind and to promote a desired behavior. In contrast, propaganda uses one-sided and often nonfactual information or opinions that appear to be facts, along with emotional appeals, to change a person’s mind and promote a desired behavior. Most information, whether factual or not, is communicated through the mass media. More and more, that information relies on the emotional appeal inherent in visual presentations.
critic American Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion. It stressed the need for images to change a person’s attitude. “Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying an idea,” wrote Lippmann, “and next in order, words that call up pictures in memory.” Recognizable symbols used in visual presentations will become long-lasting memories with the power to change attitudes if viewers have a chance to actively think about the content of the image and relate it to their own situation. All human communication—whether advertising layouts, lectures from parents and professors, closing
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influence listeners’ choices. According to Aristotle, persuasion has three components: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos refers to a source’s credibility. A professor for a well-known university will usually be more believable speaking about the state of the economy than an ordinary citizen
Logos refers to the logical arguments used to persuade an individual. Whatever
When pictorial stereotypes are repeated enough times, they become part of a society’s culture.
And our culture is flooded with more pictorial images than ever before in the history of mankind.... hurling is into new demotions of the human psyche, slowly diminishing the very human nature that’s kept us progressing and bettering and living.
ones that control which images get seen. It is always to the advantage of the dominant groups to stereotype other groups in order to secure dominance.
Celebs
Pictorial stereotypes presented in the media of all these cultural groups shape the public’s perception of them.
Nowhere is the unequal status of men and women as obvious as in advertising. Images in magazine ads and in television commercials show women as sexual objects to attract the attention of potential customers to the product. Hair care, clothing, and makeup advertisements regularly give women the impression that they are inferior if they do not measure up to the impossible beauty standards demonstrated by high-priced models. Research on television commercials has revealed that men are used as voice-overs when an authority figure is desired, women
power, ownership, privilege, and respect are at the core of communication problems between cultural groups. When the media regularly celebrate cultural diversity with words and images instead of concentrating on conflict and stereotypes, the goal of ending prejudice, racism, and discrimination will come a little closer to being reached.
“Analysis reveals the person making the analysis—not really the piece itself.”
Image analysis teaches two important lessons about the creation of memorable pictures: A producer of messages should have an understanding of the diversity of cultures within an intended audience and she should also be aware of the symbols used in images so that they are understood by members of those cultures.
A producer of messages should have an understanding of the diversity of cultures within an intended audience and she should also be aware of the symbols used in images so that t...
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A viewer who rests a conclusion about an image on only a personal perspective denies the chance of perceiving the image in a more meaningful way.
pleasing visual messages come from an awareness of what has been produced before while contemporary pictures will influence future image creation. Since
Future of Instagram
Doing your job and not causing unjust harm has been called the “ethics mantra.” As long as those professional obligations are met, the first part of the mantra is satisfied. But to be considered ethical, you must also make sure that any harm that may ensue must be justified.
Any action that causes physical or mental harm without adequate justification is unethical.
Golden Rule The golden rule, or the ethic of reciprocity, teaches people to “love your neighbor as yourself.” This theory has been attributed to ancient Greek philosophers such as Pittacus of Mytilene (died 568bce), considered one of the “Seven Sages of Greece,” who wrote, “Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him;” Thales of Miletus (died 546bce), another Sage of Greece who said, “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing;” and Epictetus (died 135ce), a Stoic philosopher
it is not acceptable to cause great harm to a few persons in order to bring about a little benefit to many. However, if everyone is being treated justly, then it is acceptable to do something that might provide a large benefit to the community as a whole.
visited. Veil of Ignorance Articulated by the American philosopher John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice in 1971, the veil of ignorance philosophy
Cultural analysis of a picture involves identifying the symbols and metaphors used in an image and determining their meaning for the society as a whole.
Real world experiences infuse an image under analysis with special meaning for the viewer so that underlying metaphors can be discovered.
“Metaphors serve as interpretive frameworks for organizing information about the world and making sense of experiences.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, expand the point when they write, “No metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis.” The American anthropologist Evelyn Payne Hatcher, author of Art and Culture: An Introduction to Anthropology of Art (1999), wrote that metaphors “are a matter of trying to understand and comment upon what is going on [within a picture] in terms of our previous experience.” As
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