Contents

In our daily routine, we end up blinded to what surrounds us. Questioning the contents of current imagery then becomes difficult. Therefore, we propose some visual tools to help refresh our perspectives on media portrayals of people. One of the main principles involved is that of collecting and comparing. Here the visual Sherlock Holmes in us may become most active, noticing composition details and value patterns.

Taking an overview implies taking a certain distance. Yet, deeper understanding of our picture world is also gained from going into the image with empathy. While gathering and selecting bits and pieces of “media realities”, you and your students may want to stop surfing on the surface for an instant, in order to dive into the multi-layered meaning of a visual message. This is best achieved by slipping into the shoes of the pictured person, carefully imitating a posture or expression. If you get no photograph taken, you may find that verbalizing diffuse feelings becomes easier, an advantage of the ‘understanding by doing’ approach. If you decide to take a picture, it will give you a chance to note the difference between what a posture feels like and what it looks like, a dimension we often dismiss in our routine zapping.

Looking at models from past paintings, we get a chance to see how the masculine and feminine norms have fluctuated in time within the Western tradition (see contribution by Margareta Gynning, p. 18). On the other hand, certain characteristics have remained, though their meaning may have changed. Take the skin colour of women: Check out advertising from the cosmetics industry or the “Media Model V” collage. All over the world, a light shade of skin continues to stand for female beauty, purity and youth, even if suntan is often interpreted positively, because it is an indicator of leisure, which remains a rare commodity.

Objectives

• Cast a critical eye on ourselves and our cultural traditions.
• Become aware of what details in the image make us interpret it a particular way by using visual tools such as framing, reframing, focussing, or making collages from media images or reproductions of paintings.

• Become aware of how stereotypes are constructed and composed and how they influence our perception.

Organisation

Media imagery provides a good starting point to achieve the above-mentioned objectives. The exercises proposed stimulate participants in the workshops to look at images from a variety of angles. The new visual skills can then be applied to a variety of topics.

The collect and compare strategy quickly provides a person with a basic stereotype grid about media women and media men. Role-playing brings an understanding through doing, which helps more explicit verbalization of what is at stake with a given posture or expression. Group discussions bring out multiple perspectives, further enriching the seeing experience, provided the group moderator encourages this aspect. We then have the best base to investigate visual patterns and their likely origins. We can try to understand the impact of socio-economic circumstances on the variations of gender codes. To get to know ourselves better, it may also be worthwhile to question the implications of these gender representations in our lives.

Exercise 1
Media women and media men
Gather a variety of newspaper or magazine visuals. You may want to focus on politicians, on stars, on children, on fashion figures, on video game characters or on advertising creatures. You may want to mix. The point is to collect images with a common theme. Is there a feature that strikes you? It can be a body posture, a facial expression, a dominant colour or something about the staging. Make a collage that helps others to see the recurring element/s. Discussions can then start in the group and different views onto the same work will surely further enrich this process of visual exploration of our media.

Exercise 2
Counter-stereotypes
Once your students have a clearer image of what today makes a man masculine and what makes a woman feminine, you are ready to embark on the counter-stereotype exercise. See the collage “Men can smile too”. What detail is crucial to signify “masculinity” and “femininity”? How can you modify a feature to make it less stereotypical? What detail can give a body posture a more sexual overtone today? How was it in art in the past? And in contemporary art, what do you notice?

In actual fact, stereotypes negate our human diversity. On the other hand, they help a certain form of communication. What is the advantage of stereotypes in advertising? What are the poss-ible problems? How do the people in your group perceive the pressure of gender stereotyping in their job or in their daily life? Do they personally find a woman with thick and wet lips to be exciting? Do they find a man with a dark and rough look sexy? What is their personal preference? How was male and female seductiveness represented in the past?

Think of women in fashion, on music television or in most porn productions. What could the reasons behind the varying beauty ideal for women be? Why do men usually appear less naked than women? Which other culture/s, past or present, do you know in which men are visually more striking than women?

Exercise 3
Travel in time
If you gather art reproductions, most likely you will find plenty of portraits of elegant people and powerful men, as well as many nude females. You may choose one or several reproductions and combine them. If you do not want to cut into these publications, photocopy or scan them for rework on your computer. Take those visuals that speak most to you. You may then want to check current magazines for portraits that have various aspects in common with the example/s you have chosen from the past. What seems to have changed? What appears to be similar? What socio-economic situation may be the same and what may be different? Feel then free to apply your newly gained visual skills to explore other topics.

Exercise 4
Framing
Construct a few frames of different sizes out of paper or cardboard. You may want to add an elaborate border to some of them. Move these framing windows over images you find in a magazine or in an art history book. What happens?

Reframing is a useful tool to enhance our seeing, because it puts the familiar in a new light. We slow down and pay attention to details. We notice that the photographed hand is actually finely retouched, so that no lines and no veins show. The same is true for eyes in advertising. In other words, it is not just any hand or eye, it is a photo-arranged reality that has many things in common with the art of painting.

Exercise 5
Text and context
Take any image you want, transformed with collage or not. Insert the same picture in various page settings: newspaper, magazine, photo album, calendar. If needed, enlarge it with a photocopier or with your computer after having scanned it. How does the new lay-out environment affect the meaning of the image and your perception of it? How do others seem to respond? If you add a caption next to it, give it a heading, a title or a price, like in an auction catalogue, what happens then to your perception of the picture?

Questions

• How do visual messages and their implicit norms influence us, considering that images “out there” are inside of us the second we see them?

• Faced with repetitive media models coming from all channels all the time, what choices do we really have without visual awareness and value-questioning?