Pretty cunning linguists then.
Cheers indeed.
I really don't want to belabor this as it's pretty basic stuff, but I would like to ask as to how you find a photograph to end up being satisfying for you as a viewer. A photograph can't speak verbally. And if it has no text or caption, it needs to use objects within the frame that represent something meaningful to you, or to get your attention, etc.. How do you decide on which photograph has meaning to you? Isn't it based on your own environment, and your personal and collective social and cultural background? And what you've also learned about conventions of composition and geometry and color association, tonality, etc.. You say, "
The beauty of photography is that it doesn't require an explanation" but maybe that's because you've developed a way of reacting to images based on all that social and cultural feedback, and all those learned conventions. You've developed an 'explanation' already.
It also could be the reason why art and music and the written word can sometimes be difficult to interpret if they are outside those codes we've already established. e.g., I haven't learned to understand Cubism and therefore have difficulty with interpreting it. Yet a friend of mine has studied it and learned to understand it. The images have meaning to her based on her social and cultural background. There's a distinct connotation of what she sees. I assume it could also "speak to me without explanation" but only if I had something to anchor onto.
And let's say the object in the photograph is your ex-lover. You would react to it based on the person you see in the image. But if I look at that same image, it's only some stranger in another photograph. But what if within the frame there are other things going on that I can connect with based on my personal and collective social/cultural understanding (which means everything I know about the world and can understand.) Now it doesn't matter that the person in the image is a stranger. The image takes on meaning to me for other reasons. We both identified with the image based on what we saw from our own personal and collective world.
In respect to poetry, language is a set of symbols that we learn to construct for communication. What if you tried to understand a poem written in a language that you didn't know at all? (an unrecognizable pattern of symbols.) The poem can't really 'speak' to you. It needs 'explanation.' You need to use your learned social and cultural skills to be able to interpret a poem. And if you have a limited vocabulary, a poem in a language that you learned might also be hard to interpret. Poets are well aware of syntax and the nuances of the meaning of words. This would be like me not understanding Cubism and not being able to interpret it. It needs explaining.
As readers of images, our understanding and interpretation of those images comes from our learned social and cultural background (both personal and shared.) Even if they are abstract images or lacking in color or full of color, we respond to them based on what we already know (I like a certain color and I will react if I see that color in an image, etc..there is no need for 'explanation;' it's already been interpreted in my mind.) We are always trying to 'make sense' of what we see, whether abstract or realistic.
btw, an interesting body of work from the 1990s that sort of addresses this thing of reading images based on our internal explanations of them, is Uta Barth's out of focus images of ordinary scenes. The viewer is challenged to "strain their perception of things that are barely visible.."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uta_Barth
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/barth-field-20-t07627/text-summary
Anyway, hopefully you might not dismiss all of what's been said here....
....and I see that your last comment was removed. I'll end here (I promise)
🙂
