Problems With The Summary Analysis Of The Images

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 293):

Imagically speaking then the overall tone is cool, calm and distanced, with FitzSimons himself as a warm engaging guide. This foregrounds the order restored over the calamity described, and reinforces the historically distanced stance FitzSimons constructs for us in the verbal text through appraisal resources. The order construed by the images can also be read as counterpointing the waves unsuspected eruption in the verbal text, a point we'll return to when considering narrative structure below.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the authors claim that the photographic representation of a beach on a sunny day, and of Peter FitzSimons, realise the meaning 'cool', simply because the representations of the sky and Peter FitzSimons are blue, and the representation of the sea is green, and blue and green are classified as 'cool' colours in fields such as painting.

[2] To be clear, the claim that the meaning 'calm' is realised the photographic representations has not been argued for; it is a collocation of 'cool' and 'distanced'. On the other hand, the claim that the photographic representations realise the meaning 'distanced' derives from misconstruing the experiential distance between the photographer and the beach as a distant social relationship across different orders of experience: between viewers (phenomena) and a representation of anonymous people on a beach (metaphenomena).

[3] To be clear, the claim that the photographic representation of Peter FitzSimons expresses the meanings 'warm and engaging' rests on the claim that 'a close shot (head and shoulders), front on, level with the viewer and involving eye contact and a smile' expresses a 'trusty friend' — a claim that is invalidated by every photograph that does not, such as police mugshots.

[4] To be clear, these are bare assertions unsupported by evidence. As previously explained, because images lack a grammatical stratum, 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.