Blue colour cohesion resonates across the landscape sky and the portrait (loud saturated blue in the landscape, more muted in the portrait). Inter-modally, the blue of the portrait is picked up typographically by Peter FitzSimons' name in the Kicker; and the green of the sea is similarly replayed on the word in in the 'placeintime' title of the column on the portrait. The general ambient effect is a cool Ideal in relation to the lightness of the sand on the beach (the Real).
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the chief difficulty posed by image analysis is that images are only bi-stratal: content and expression, without a grammar (despite the use of the term 'grammar' by Kress and Van Leeuwen for images). The proof that images do not have a grammatical stratum is that, unlike verbal texts, they cannot be read aloud (despite the use of the term 'Reading Images' by Kress And Van Leeuwen). Because of this, much of what passes for image analysis is little more than a private exercise, where one explanation is as good as another. As Halliday (1985/1994: xvi-xvii) wrote for verbal discourse analysis:
A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.
[2] To be clear, here the authors characterise the 'ambient effect' of a photographic representation of a beach on a sunny day as 'cool', simply because the sky is blue and the sea is green, and blue and green are classified as 'cool' colours in fields such as painting. Summer temperatures on Bondi Beach can exceed 40°C.
[3] Again, 'ideal' and 'real' are construals of experience, not textual statuses, and the photographer has little choice in where the sky appears relative to the sand in a photograph.
No comments:
Post a Comment