Looking Back
Tom Young
1995
AC 1995.7
On Tuesday night, March 22, the Mead hosted the third installment in the Exposing the Mead Series. Alex, Perry, Alice and I really appreciated the support shown by students and the Mead’s faculty by both their attendance and their lively participation in the discussion. To those who could not make it, we hope to see you in a couple weeks, and in the meantime would be glad to catch you up on our in-depth discussion on text and photography, and how language can affect our visual experience.
Perry De La Vega ’13 eased us into the discussion by asking the audience to consider what the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” meant to us, and then to think about where we generally see text within images. While at first the audience mainly brought up advertising, Perry demonstrated how rarely we actually experience images without words, pointing to captions next to works of art, titles, artist’s statements, and even credit lines in online search engines. The question then becomes, as Perry articulately stated, how does the relationship between typographic semiotic and the rendered image impact our experience? Or, how linguistic signifiers, for example words that are dependent on their social and cultural contexts, and the arrangement of these signifiers affect the audience’s visual experience?
The hope was that through the examination of the photographs in front us we would start to see this interplay between the visual language, image, and physical and social contexts in which they both exist, and how this interaction creates a complex system of meanings, which together form the piece as a whole.
To make these ideas a bit easier to swallow Perry related this process to code breaking. As he explained, since we already know that words are a code, we simply have to transfer what we know about reading codes to the photographic image. The layers we have to work through are: the one created by the words and their accepted meanings and the adjacent images; the mental images that the word evoke combined with the actual image; the meaning of the images and how that alters the words; and finally the words called to the viewer’s mind by the images.
First, we looked at Lesley Dill’s “A Word Made Flesh: Throat” (1994), which is a stunning photograph printed on mulberry paper. It depicts a woman looking skyward with her throat exposed to the viewer, on which is scrawled the words “I am afraid to own a body, I am afraid to own a soul”, which were originally penned by Emily Dickinson. The audience immediately picked up on the physicality of the work, and especially of the words, which are handwritten in an almost violent manner. People used words such branded, tattooed, and inscribed to describe the lettering, which Perry related back to the placement of the words on the women’s throat. He argued that the words could be a physical representation of the woman’s emotions as she struggles to speak. People also picked up on the careful placement of the words, and how the artist had matched them to the contours of the women’s neck to both elongate its shape and also simultaneously depict the woman’s almost choking on the words. Ultimately, the audience agreed that without the incorporated words the piece would be much less powerful, and would lose its darkness. Furthermore, as Perry brought up, this tension highlights the conflict that communicating our fear of owning a body by using an actual body creates.
The second photograph we considered was Tom Young’s “Looking Back” (1995), which depicts a mental institution. The piece is mounted on aluminum, and a small rectangle, in which the image of a woman obscured by a layer of words is suspended, projects from the plane of the photograph. The words, which seem to restrain the woman, unlike the Dill piece are narrative and come from her description of her time at the mental institution. The audience responded to the layering of text over a protruding image, which creates an eerie sense of the woman reaching out but ultimately unable to connect with the viewer. The aluminum and the murkiness in the photograph created by a double exposure add to this cold, spooky, detached feeling. Perry ended the discussion of the photograph with a reference to the physical size of the lettering, which requires the viewer to get extremely close to the image, and thus adds to the sense that the viewer is trying to decipher a whisper is coming from inside the dark walls of the building.
Unfortunately at this point we had run out of time and Perry ended the discussion. During the course of the evening he had led the audience to consider not only the images in front of them nor only the words in front of them, but also the relationship between the two. And we left with a greater appreciation for both photographs, as well as a better understanding of how language can shape a visual experience and how many layers are involved in that relationship.
We hope to see you next time, when Alex Strecker ’13, will be leading the discussion.
-Thea
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