Shapiro+K+Wk+11

4/12 Malcom and Ramage and my VSP

In this chapter, Ramage describes the process of interpretation. He explains that we must use all available context to understand and “translate” the image. This translation is what we understand after the image is filtered through context as well as our personal experience.

Malcom quotes Szarkowski’s idea about photographs photographs, that they all contain five “characteristics and problems that have seemed inferent in the medium.. The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.” all of these things are what are viewed and analyzed in Ramage’s translation.

Szarkowskis’s way of getting at this idea was to place art photographs side by side with snapshots, showing how they were indistinguishable. In this way, he is acting out Ramage’s idea of discounting, understanding an object in terms of something else; the five characteristics are used as a tool to relate and understand different photographs when displayed together.

Defamiliarizing is another important term from Ramage, where the audience separates from their prior perceptions and understands a text, or in this case an image, in a new way. I think this is the most important thing that I need to do in my VSP; I need to make people think about the way they treat music in a different way. In order to do this, my images need to make the audience aware of the way music influences people that most do not realize.

In my VSP, I am also going to try and incorporate the idea of intellectual communities. By presenting certain musical genre stereotypes, the audience will be able to understand how to interpret the image. For those who are involved in those sub communities, more intricate messages may be available for construction. For example, one genre I make use of is electronic music, partly because it has a well known and recently popular subculture associated with it. A common stereotype of this culture is wearing many plastic beaded bracelets, called kandi. These are worn to represent the ideas of unity and respect for other concert-goers, and were originally given to new ‘ravers’ upon entering the rave scene.Since the purpose of my VSP is to show how music has the power to form identities and be part of a group, this bracelet would send that message in a more powerful way to those involved in that intellectual community.