Week Two Reading Images Represented participant vs Interactive participant

I was excited to order Reading Images,The Grammar of Visual Design by: Kress and van Leeuwen. I have spent the last twenty-five years of my life in the art and design worlds. I studied art and architecture history and had close friends who were artists and art therapists. They introduced me to Rudolf Arneheim and his work image and meaning and other writers and ideas about reading art and images. As teacher, I encourage my students to express their ideas through the use effective drawings. I teach them Visual Literacy. I talk to them about line types and how lines evoke different readings. I teach them that image composition and directions of display tell stories and engages viewers. I want them to learn how to “read” buildings. I am looking forward to document these ideas and have them to my students in the future. My understanding had been based on experience and instinct, so to get these ideas in a book was important to me.

When the book arrived, I judged by its cover! I thought a book on visual grammar needed to have much stronger images on the cover that have universal meaning (i.e. art works from ancient cultures or drawings by Picasso) or have been produced by a graphic artist who has mastered the grammar of art and design.
I am very interested of the ideas about image and signifier and that new understanding challenged my assumptions about meaning of visual signs. I thought that the visual language had a universal meaning but reading Chapter Two made me aware of how society and culture assign meaning to symbols and images and how the meanings change with time. I wonder if the meanings of images are becoming more universal due to the communication revolution and due to Google images.

Chapter One of the book was clear and made sense to me. When I started reading Chapter Two I felt so lost and I thought the basics of semiotics needed to be explained better so I looked it up on YouTube and Found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgxTKUP_WI&index=1&list=PL73o0LtCCd_-3XUsalGLfe2JB-2UJqeSS

or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkp8dUWywor

this excellent lecture on graphics :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4b7qXbRHTM

Another problem I had with the book is that I found the authors rely heavily on contemporary Australian diagrams and ignore other cultures images and graphics. Also all graphics were in black and white. I am a big fan of Russian constructionist art and El Lissitzky’s constructivists picture “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge loses it effect with out color.

I thought changing “object” and “element” in art and image to “participants” made the concepts more confusing than they need to be. I understand that act of making image and reading the image are intertwined. To make things worse, the image on page 45 ( fig 2.1 the British used guns) was so small and very hard to read. It make the entire comparison and discussion on the value of abstraction hard to follow.

With advent of the internet and smart phone and digital screen everywhere. the Social meaning of images will probably become more universal. Emojis are on everyone's cell phone and that could be a unifying force for visual literacy.