Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 5: Photography and Commodity Culture , 4th ed, 2009, CONT

From Posner's Spray It Loud

Ramamurthy reviews Barthes on denoted and connoted messages.  Denotation is the most obvious reading, the surface reading, the fact of the photo.  The connotation is inferred, is symbolic, and is also, for the advertiser, the more important level of meaning.  Stuart Hall (1993) reflects on how messages are encoded and decoded, observing that for images to be successful, producers and consumers have to share a common frame of reference, a similar schemata.  This is why corporations most always craft their advertising locally, in order to be able to speak to consumers effectively.  Ramamurthy cites Posner’s Spray it Loud for examples of oppositional readings (trying to find a copy of this now).

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 5: Photography and Commodity Culture , 4th ed, 2009

Chapter author Anandi Ramamurthy is a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Central Lancashire University.

Starts with a great quote from Debord (1967):

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.  Everything that directly lived has receded into a representation. 

Media messages present a glamorous world of sensual experience crafted to minimize conflict.  The camera and photography support the global economic order in two ways:  through creation of presentation of spectacle, and as a tool for surveillance.  Images prod
uce a ruling ideology.  The freedom to consume these images is imagined as freedom itself.   (Sontag 1979: 178-79)

Cites Tagg (1988) on development of portrait photography as part of the development of commodity culture.  The mid-19th century boom in portraiture tapped into the desire to emulate the wealthy and eventually spread across all levels of society.  The demand for portraits possibly stifled creative use of the camera.  President Lincoln used a carte-de-viste as a campaign tool and credited it with his electoral success.

Photo:  Mathew B. Brady. Abraham Lincoln on the day of his speech at the Cooper Union, February, 27, 1860. Carte-de-visite photograph. James Wadsworth Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (046) Digital ID # al0046

Photographer Mathew Brady took this portrait of Abraham Lincoln at his studio in New York City on the same day that Lincoln gave his now-famous Cooper Union address. Brady retouched the photograph, smoothing facial lines and straightening his subject’s “roving” left eye. The effect was striking, and what Lincoln jokingly referred to as his “shadow” later appeared on hundreds of campaign buttons, posters, and small printed cartes-de-visite. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lincoln/the-run-for-president.html