Visual Culture :: essays research papers

Symbols and images have a more than epoch-making impact on one?s views of the world. Since childhood, a soul?s brain uses representation of images into meanings to make sense of their world. These images then go on to being either the truth or falsehood and base a person?s views of the world for the rest of their life. All this can be explained through the idea of representation of customary cultural mediums such as advertisements and the television. Representation is the elbow room a person interprets symbols and images of a culture and the way these images explain why the world is the way it is. These symbols and images be seen in everyday cultural mediums so nobody is exempt from representation even to a lower place strict exclusion from society. An example would be of a person brought up on Fifth Avenue who believes that the best clothes are do by the likes of Armani compared to a vagabond who believes that the best clothes are the ones that pass away him through the nig ht. Nearly every nisus of visual media a person comes into contact with is a photograph, which is undisputable evidence of an event. There is the myth of photographic truth, which means that photographs are subjective, yet can be manipulated and taken in different contexts. Take the photographs taken by Nazi?s during the holocaust. The photographs pertain that Nazis killed millions of people, but the photographs may also take on many implicit meanings. Connotative meanings are views people hold on images based on their cultures and past experiences. One may have the connotative view that the images are horrendous while another might find justification at bottom the actions of the Nazis. Of the two connotative meanings mentioned with the Nazi pictures they each hold different ideologies ideas that form a culture. The ideas of ideology are usually taken in as the views of most of the population of a given culture, therefore ideologies define cultures. An American ideology is the belief in independent freedom while a communist ideology is communal sharing. How are these ideologies passed on in a culture? They start off in schools and places that people gather. Malls are fill with advertisements. There are ads that symbolize skinny brunettes wearing Chanel as the perfective tense woman, which is what most men and women tend to take as truth. Then there are ads to enlist people into the army, which give a message of a strong country run by individuals.