Problems With The Interpersonal Analysis Of The Image

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 293):

Interpersonally, FitzSimons' portrait is a close shot (head and shoulders), front on, level with the viewer and involving eye contact and a smile – rendering him a trusty friend. The landscape on the other hand is a long shot, from an oblique angle, positioning viewers well above the beach and involving no eye contact or affect – a very distancing effect.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, a google image search of police mugshots quickly demonstrates that 'a close shot (head and shoulders), front on, level with the viewer and involving eye contact and a smile' does not necessarily render the meanings 'trust' or 'friend'. For example, consider the photograph, below, of someone who was arrested for putting her children, aged 3 and 5, in the boot of her car before going for a drive with a friend:

[2] To be clear, the interpersonal metafunction is concerned with 'our construction of social relationships, both those that define society and our own place in it, and those that pertain to the immediate dialogic situation' and thus 'constructs our social collective and, thereby, our personal being' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 511).

Here the authors have misinterpreted the photograph's construal of experiential distance, between the photographer and the beach, as the photograph's construction of a distant social relationship between viewers and a representation of anonymous people on a beach.

To be clear, social relationships can only obtain at the same order of experience, in this case, at the order of viewer, or at the order of the representation. That is, a viewer cannot have a social relationship with a photographic representation of a person, but can, of course, with the person who was photographed. By the same token, a representation of a person, in a photograph or novel, cannot have a social relationship with a viewer or a reader, but can, of course, with other representations in a photograph or novel.