Contents

It is only when we have trouble decoding an image that we realise how our way of seeing and looking is structured by the visual conventions of our own time. We need to analyse the different cultural codes and messages that surround us in everyday life.
It is important to learn how to decipher images in order to understand how the past is a part of the present. By finding parallels between Now and Then, sensing how the past is part of the present, we can see how meaning is construed visually.

The power that images hold over us is best illustrated by national symbols. National identity is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, visualised in pictures and influencing our understanding thereof. Images are not only a part of ideology, but are also instrumental in the making of it.

Objectives

To investigate how personal experience/history and factors such as gender, sexuality, socio-cultural background, age, geography and nationality influence one’s perception of images. Focus is on image awareness and identity using both old and new works of art as well as mass-produced images.

The intention is to give both teachers and students skills which will help them to analyse the different cultural codes and messages that surround them in everyday life.

Organisation

One of the best ways to start a discussion around image awareness with your students is to use a picture that is difficult to decode.

Exercise 1 
The importance of the look and mutual recognition
Let the students describe, in detail, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting from the 16th century. Initially they will strive to make the figure into a human being although it is construed of animals and various objects. We learn to decode faces at an early age, hence our compulsion later to locate the outline of a face on all sorts of objects. Relational psychologists stress the significance of vision and visuality for the construction of identity. One of our strongest motivations is the wish for mutual recognition and a desire to relate to the world. In our quest for meaning, we as children, learn cultural codes and messages by using creative languages like drawing and painting. In school, children therefore should not be treated as “little artists”, but encouraged to use all their imaginative powers and learn critical tools for decoding.

Exercise 2
Portraits
Today we use new technologies to help us relate to the world. What is vital is that your students do it by sharing which is an important part of being recognized. Many of them take photos with their mobiles and immediately share them with their friends by putting them out onto the Net. Let your students take photos of each other with their mobile phones. Have a discussion afterwards about which ones they like and why they want to share them with others.

Exercise 3
Gender and “the male gaze”
Let your students look at the images in Volume I (137-141) and read pages (111-113) in Volume II in “The Learning Eye”. Analyze the text and compare the images with their own photos. Discuss how images are not only part of ideology but instrumental in creating it. Julius Kronberg’s painting “Nymph and Fauns” from the 19th century shows how images influence our ways of “looking”. The two fauns, in the top left hand corner direct the viewer to use the perspective of a heterosexual voyeur, the “male gaze”, when looking at the nude woman. A comparison between her and Jan Massys’s “Venus Cythereia” (p. 24, Image 4), from the 16th century, shows that though reclining nudes are part of the western tradition Kronberg’s nymph is made from a more passive and objectified perspective. Eva Saro’s collage (p. 20, Image 3) illustrates that today we have an even more sexualized perspective in our visual culture. Nowadays men are also portrayed as sex objects while women’s bodies are literally cut into pieces and commodified with a “penetrating look”.

Exercise 4 
Gender and role-playing
Ask your students to try to imitate the body language of the persons in Alexander Roslin’s “John Jennings Esq., his Brother and Sister-in-Law” from the 18th century. Let them use digital cameras as a tool to help them with role-playing. Discuss how gender norms have constantly been changing throughout history. What we today identify as the female norm, as “femininity”, was in the 18th century an ideal for both men and women of the elite. They wore makeup and wigs, their whole lifestyle was attuned to a life of luxury, to “conspicuous consumption”. Their richly embroidered clothes were made of silk and velvet and decorated with expensive lace. Since the 16th century this androgynous beauty ideal has its roots in the culture of the European courtier. “Grace” and beauty were for the nobility characteristics that were also applied to men, and in the 17th century the French King Louis XIV became the great role model. Dance and theatre were instrumental in the creation of the performative role of the monarch. What we identify as the body language of the classical ballet dancer was not looked upon as a “feminine” role until the 19th century when the construction of gender was built on the division of the sexes, of separate public and private spaces.

The portrait by Roslin shows how we, by using role-playing, can be made more aware of how constrained we are by gender norms, the structures preserving heterosexuality as something uniform and natural.

Exercise 5
National identity
Let your students bring one image or object that gives them associations to their own national identity. Discuss what made them choose specifically that image and how they would define nationality in connection with the country they live in. Let them then look at the images in Volume I (pages 142–151) and read about “Nationalism — From a Midsummer Dance to a Sliced ‘Dala’ Horse” in Volume II (pages 114–119). They can also use the Action CD and take part in a tour about Nationalism. Afterwards look at the images together with your students and analyze how different conceptions of nationality through the ages have shaped the country they live in. If some of them have experiences of other cultures how has that in turn influenced their identity?

Variations & extensions

• Investigate the importance of class, gender or cultural background in relation to ethnicity.

• Try to find important national icons on the web and discuss stereotypes and counter-stereotypes.