Notes

Representation and interaction: designing the position of the viewer

* Represented participants: the people, the places and things depicted in images

* Interactive participants: the people who communicate with each other through images, the producers and viewers of images

* Relations between represented participants; relations between interactive and represented participants(the interactive participants’ attitudes towards the represented participants); relations between interactive participants( the things interactive participants do to or for each other through images)

* Interactive participants are real people who produce and make sense of images in the context of social institutions which, to different degrees and in different ways, regulate what may be ‘said’ with images, how it should be said, and how it should be interpreted; in some cases, the interaction is direct and immediate. Producer and viewer know each other and are involved in face to face interaction

* However, in many cases, there is no immediate and direct involvement. The producer is absent for the viewer, and the viewer is absent for the producer

* Most viewers will not only never meet all these contributors to the production process face to face, but also have only a hazy, and perhaps distorted and glamorized, idea of the production processes behind the image

* Producers can never really know their vast and absent audiences, and must create a mental image of ‘the’ viewers and ‘the’ way viewers make sense of their pictures

* The implied author is a disembodied voice, or even a set of implicit norms rather than a speaker or a voice

* The implied reader, preferred reading position is an image of a certain competence brought to the text and a structuring of such competence within the text

* The image itself, and a knowledge of the communicative resources that allow its articulation and understanding, a knowledge of the way social interactions and social...