Unit #2: Visual Analysis

Focus Question for Unit 2: “What is this image doing to me, a subjective viewer?”

In Unit Two, we’ve practiced the close reading and analysis of visual texts: learning to recognize and understand the choices an artist/photographer makes in creating a photograph, advertisement, selfie or other visual text and how these choices can add up to an overall meaning.

For your second assignment, you will be composing a visual analysis. This task asks you to:
analyze the action of an image on its viewer,
and then support your interpretation with evidence from the text.

Questions like, “What visual strategies are at work in this image?” and “What reaction does this image draw from me?” are good jumping off points, but your analysis should go much deeper and be much more specific.

How can I extend my analysis and “go deeper”?
Locate the visual within its cultural context. The visual text is produced by a certain culture and within a certain cultural context, so one thing you’ll need to consider in this paper is how the visual text either uses cultural norms/values or challenges cultural norms/values.
We’ve talked a lot about how your interpretation of a text is influenced by your individual experience and context(s) (your lenses). In this paper, you can discuss your subjective position and how that influences your reading of a text, or you can discuss your subjectivity implicitly by speaking about your/the image’s larger cultural context.
How will I make a claim?
This assignment is not a thesis driven essay. Sometimes we have a tendency to come to really nice and clean but somewhat flat claims about texts. In this assignment, you’re still making a claim about the text, but you’ll spend the paper exploring the ways in which the text supports that claim or doesn’t support that claim (e.g., the many contrasting ways one specific strategy might be at work, the various nuanced and complex interpretations, the way that your identity and contexts changes the way you look at this image). I would much rather see you wrestling with complex thoughts and in-depth analysis than have you tell me something surface-level, obvious, or cliché about the text you’re analyzing.
There are three options for this paper:

Option 1—Photo Analysis: You focus your analysis on a photograph from the CCP archive or current exhibit.
Option 2—Visual Analysis: You focus your analysis on a visual from the UA Museum of Art (e.g. painting, mural, sculpture, etc.)
Your approach to either of these options should be similar. You’ll spend your entire composition analyzing the image and exploring what it is doing to you/your cultural context and the strategies or aspects that are doing that.
Option 3—Artist’s Statement: Using any tools at your disposal, you will create a photograph or visual text with a certain goal in mind of what you want the image to do to its viewers. This goal must respond to or challenge a cultural norm or value that you can see is actively present in your life (think about the selfie activity where you responded to an issue or debate on campus life).
You get to determine the strategies for achieving this; you make decisions on: lighting,staged or candid, color or grayscale, arrangement, subjects/objects, angle, focus, zoom, contrast, line, etc., etc. You will submit your image(s) (or whatever visually-based creation) along with a paper in which you:
explain and defend all your choices and strategies as an artist.
How your context(s) shapes your perspective
How you hope your target audience and their contexts will shape their analysis of your creation
Regardless of the option you choose…
Length: 4-5 pages (DS), a Works Cited page, and a page with the image you’re analyzing or the image you produced
Format: MLA (including header and pager number/last name)

Tentative Due Dates:
First Draft: hard copy in class (and to d2l drop box) Tuesday, March 21st
Complete Second Draft: by class (and to d2l drop box) Thursday, March 23rd
Third draft due in studio: Wednesday, March 29th
Final Draft: Thursday, March 30th to d2l dropbox