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Read The Visual Meaning

Decent Essays
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What does it mean to ‘read the visual’? What do you understand by the term ‘visuality’? Using a photograph or single image, explore the relationship between seeing and being, as it applies to visual phenomena. Include a copy of the image.

To read the visual, one must look past the initial image and understand the context, meaning, emotions and events that are occurring within the image. We all subconsciously draw a meaning from what we see, we do this by identifying what is known and breaking that down into a simplified meaning. A majority of us see the world visually, yet some people have the ability to reiterate what they see in a visually poetic manner. A literary poem invites the reader to create an image in their mind, contrastingly …show more content…

In order to understand Guernica (1937) one must ‘read the visual’; With the help of Ora Attia’s 2011 article “Separation and Individuation in Picasso’s Guernica”, the visual metaphors and hidden meanings in the piece were more evident to me, making Guernica (1937) not only visually but intellectually stimulating as well. The perpetual anti-war symbol has many hidden meanings. The corrida bull and the horse on the far left can be representative of “the Spanish warring factions” (Attia, 2011: 1571). By simply looking at the visual one may see the bull standing over a grieving mother and her child, however if one reads the visual the mother and her child represent the victims of the catastrophe and the bull represents the Spanish people looking after said victims. Reading the visual can be done in different layers, one can scratch the surface or one can dig deep into the abyss of allegorical meanings. An example of this in Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is the light on the roof of the left hand side of the painting. By simply reading the visual the light can be depicted as the symbol for warding off evil, the evil eye, notwithstanding, reading further into the visual the light plays a more significant meaning. Due to the fact that this painting was created by a Spaniard for the people of Spain, there is ought to be meanings in the painting an onlooker will not understand. One of the meanings …show more content…

The process is one step further than simply reading the visual. Visuality is the combination of seeing and being or as Hal Foster is cited by Alexa Sand “the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations” (Sand, 2012: 90). One text which epitomises both the importance and envy of the visual is Kathryn N. Benzel’s text “Modern In(ter)vention: Reading the Visual”. Benzel discusses Virginia Woolf’s attempt to become imbedded in the practice of visuality; Woolf attempted to combine literature and visual art (Benzel, 2003: 322). She was in awe of the painter Walter Sickert and his ability to “portray life rather than executing a portrait” (Benzel, 2003: 329). Woolf attempted to “create an aesthetic experience for reader[s]” by recreating Sickert’s paintings into a literary experience; As cited by Woolf herself it was “the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination… aesthetic sympathy” (Benzel, 2003: 324). In further writings Woolf goes on to say how imitating a painting is vain and trivial but to writers it is illusive and irresistible (Benzel, 2003: 324). An attempt to describe what visuality is almost as frivolous and Woolf’s plight to recreate paintings into a literary piece. Visuality is seeing and it is being, but one cannot trivialize both in to a

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