0:06
I want to take a couple of images now and just deconstruct them,
use some of these tools to deconstruct the images.
So remember your country needs you, the image we looked at just recently.
Here's a very different image where in fact it's a number of Aboriginal people in
Australia standing outside huts that have been constructed.
And at the bottom there we can see that the analyst has really put a lot
of work in trying to work out what the camera angle is.
So in fact, we're relatively detached from that image.
These people are not looking into our faces.
And we then become something like disengaged objective
observers on this scene.
We've been actively positioned in relation to that image.
The next image now is another deconstruction of another scene,
again from Australia of a school.
You can see there in the caption there's a kind of an analysis of what's going on.
And what we've got in this scene is this notion of a vanishing point.
So perspective in the world means you're always
orienting into this sort of vanishing points.
The vanishing points as you drive along a road,
the vanishing point as you walk down the street,
there are certain kinds of orientations which the visual world constructs for you.
And here you can see in this analysis and
little diagram we're looking at the blackboard that's kind of the focal point.
We're not really looking at the kids.
And the teachers are looking at us a bit obliquely.
The kids we're even less engaged with.
So it really is this is saying these kids are doing education.
1:40
It's not about them as people.
We'll never know who their names are.
The image is not interested in them as human beings.
It's really interested this abstract phenomenon called education.
So we can use these tools of analysis to deconstruct the grammar of images.
What I want to talk about now is the image making process, right?
So I've spoken about perceptual images, mental images.
Let's talk about visual communication.
So, one thing Locke was right about
is we see a lot of stuff in the world, and it affects us, right?
So we've seen a mountain.
We've seen mountains in general.
And we know there's sometimes snow at the top.
And they're sometimes craggy, and they're sometimes not.
But we know what a mountain is, and we know what a mountain is by repeated seeing
of that, and not just naming of things called mountains.
It's just not language, it's also a set of visual associations and
visual conceptualizations which then form mental images.
Now, I'm now painting a mountain there in visual communication.
I might be photographing a mountain as well.
But it's mediated to a degree by mental images, right?
So the mountain might not be there, I'm just doing it purely from memory.
Or the mountain might be there.
But even when it is, I'm using mental process to reconceptualize
what I'm seeing as an image.
And then what about the viewing process?
Well, something similar goes on, and part of what I'm trying to illustrate
here is the role of visual cognition, middle images in the seeing process.
It's not just seeing.
Remember the overly simplified Lockean view is that we see things, and
they affect us.
Well no, it's a much more complicated mediated kind of relationship.
So, here we've got, I'm in an art gallery,
and there's the painting that somebody's made of a mountain.
And the reason why it means something to me is I've seen mountains, and
I've seen other images of mountains.
So this is always a relationship between mental images and perceptual images.
The seeability of a scene or the seeability of an object
of visual communication is actually its thinkability.
And its thinkability is based on mental images and
a whole series of life experiences of actively constructing those meanings and
refining them over a lifetime.
So what we've got here is the idea the camera never lies.
Well, the camera is always, I won't say lying,
but it's a complicated truth where well in fact,
the camera never lies is ironical because of course the camera does lie.
So the sage who invented that phrase actually doesn't mean it to be the camera
never lies because they're really saying the camera does do something
which is heavily constructed, heavily framed by a history of mental images.
And also by relationship of, it's not just representing the world,
it's also a process of interpretation,
the interpretation of the viewer based on their own other experiences.
So when I see a picture of a mountain that somebody's put up in the gallery,
I might see different things based on my experience and
interest in mountains than somebody else as well.
So it's this complicated relationship between cognition and perception.
And also between the world as seen and
my agency in constructing the world as seeable.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisDean
