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Gillian Rose Chapter Summary

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Gillian Rose begins chapter one with a quote from Stuart Hall, which is “culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings” (Hall, 1997: 6), this quote emphasizes the main idea of the chapter because the significance is we determine the image and create our own meaning. Rose continues by explaining that this meaning that we create can vary, as it “may be explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious” (Rose, 2001:6), all images are created by the viewer’s experience and it differs from one subject to the next. Images and how the viewer experiences them is through visual imagery, as images are constructed through certain methods such as technologies and knowledge. There tends to be a distinction between vision and visuality, …show more content…

A visual image is determined by the viewer, and this concept of user opinion is difficult to challenge. Rose continues by explaining that there are multiple sites in which the meaning of an image is made, beginning with “the site of the production of an image, the site of the image itself, and the sites where it is seen by various audiences” (Rose, 2016:16), which are followed by a set of modalities. Such modalities include; technological, compositional and social. The technological aspect refers to a visual technology as “any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision” (Rose, 2016:17), this ultimately means the evolution of visual images from early paintings to television to the modern era of the internet. Compositional refers to the process of an image being made, such as the “spatial organization” (Rose, 2016:17), the actual content of the image and lastly the colour. The last modality explained by Rose is the social aspect, which refers to “the range of economic, social and political relations” (Rose, 2016: 17), meaning the socially constructed practices that interpret the image at face value (use and or visual). Photography is a technology that has been described as a medium of recording the world in a realistic way. There are technological effects that contribute to the construction of an image, some methods of looking at a visual image can be deemed unnecessary to be considered technologically produced, as images must be carefully analyzed. Rose writes, “the social to the production of images depend on rather more detailed analyses of particular industries which produce visual images” (Rose, 2016:21), which further explains the importance of taking into account all aspects of an image. Rose draws on the importance of an image by writing, “every image has a number of formal components” (Rose,

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