reading images ppt

8/20/2019 Reading Images ppt

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Reading Images:The Grammar of Visual

Design

Gunther Kress

&

Theo van Leeuwen


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Introduction:

The grammar of visual design

A grammar is the rules andconstraints on what can berepresented.

A grammar is a social resource of aparticular group.


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Visual grammar is not transparent anduniversally understood. It is culturespecific.

Visual grammar cannot be separated fromverbal grammar or any other grammar.

Individuals freely combine elements fromlanguages they know to make themselvesunderstood.


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Signs are never arbitrary.

„Motivation‟ applies to the sign-

makers and the social context inwhich the sign is produced.

The “semiotic potential” for makingsigns is determined by the resourcesavailable in a particular context.


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Communication requires that participantsmake their messages maximallyunderstandable in a particular context.

Representation requires that sign-makerschoose forms for the expression of whatthey have in mind and see as most apt

and plausible in the given context.


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Ch. 1

The Semiotic Landscape


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“Old Visual Literacy”

– dominated by writing– passage from childhood images to adult texts

– designated adult elites allowed to be imagemakers

“New Visual literacy” – complex mix of text, images, sound . .

– largely not taught in schools (?)

– applies to all life stages– threat to old visual literacy


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Language and visual communicationcan both be used to realize the “same” fundamental systems of

meaning that constitute our culture,but each does so by its own specificforms, does so differently, andindependently (p.19)

e.g. - subjective / objective


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An unconventional history of writing

Two independent modes ofrepresentation language as speech

visual images or marks

In “literate” cultures the visual issubsumed by the oral

Cultures retaining both modes oftenlabeled “illiterate”


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Semiotic Landscape

The range of forms or modes of availablecommunication

The uses and valuations of those formsand modes

The world represented visually in the newmedia is different from the worldrepresented on the pages of print media


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Different potentials for meaning making mayimply different potentials for the formation ofsubjectivities.

The different modes of representation are notheld discretely, separately as strongly boundedautonomous domains in the brain, or asautonomous communicational resources inculture.

Affective aspects of human beings and practicesare not discrete from other cognitive activities.


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Halliday’s Three Metafunctions

Ideational Metafunction– representation of the human world outside the

representational system

Interpersonal Metafunction– representation of social relationships betweenproducers and viewers/reproducers

Textual Metafunction

– Formation of complexes of signs which cohereboth internally with each other and externallywith the context in which they situated.


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Ch. 2

Narrative representations:

designing social actions


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Actor


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Unidirectional

Actor Goal


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Non-transactional reaction


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Conversion

Actor Relay Goal


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Bidirectional

interactor interactor


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Bidirectional


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Senser


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Senser

Sayer


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Sayer

U


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Utterance


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Phenomenon


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Setting


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Means


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Accompaniment


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