Encoding - the artist encodes their views and values into their art/media text.
Decoding - the viewer then interprets information/messages according to their own values.
Meanings are relative.
The date of the piece and the character of the auteur themselves will always affect how art/media should be read.
Denotative - observing the art/media in a literal way.
Connotative - searching for meaning with the work.
Studium - the piece as a whole.
Punctum - the main feature of the work (what the eye should be drawn to).
"The photograph both mirrors and creates a discourse with the world, and is never, despite its often passive way with things, a neutral representation. Indeed, we might argue that at every level the photograph involves a saturated ideological context. Full of meanings, it is a dense text in which is written the terms of reference by which an ideology both constructs meaning and reflects that meaning as a stamp of power and authority. We need to read it as the site of a series of simultaneous complexities and ambiguities, in which is situated not so much a mirror of the world as our way with that world; what Diane Arbus called 'the endlessly seductive puzzle of sight'. The photographic image contains a 'photographic message' as part of a 'practise of signification' which reflects the codes, values, and beliefs of the culture as a whole." (Clarke 1997:28-29)
I need to take subjective photographs which achieve the purpose for which they are taken. The audience will be able to explore their meaning within the discourse that they create. Both the stories that the image portrays and the intention of the project will be encoded into the photographs, which will be decoded differently by every viewer according to their values and beliefs. That makes this project even more exciting, as I will not be creating just 6-8 images, but 6-8 images with thousands of different meanings.
-Clarke, G. (1997) 'How Do We Read a Photograph?' in The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. pp. 27-39.
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