Libya denounced the action, calling an emergency session of the United Nations

(UN) Security Council. When Libya’s UN ambassador held that the downed planes
were unarmed, a U.S. official challenged the assertion, noting “we have the pictures
to prove they were not unarmed” and adding “the Libyan ambassador to the UN is
a liar.” United States personnel exhibited blurry images that were said to show mis-
siles, demanding of the Libyan representatives: “Do you think this is a bouquet of
roses?” The Libyans responded by accusing the United States of doctoring the pho-
tographs, fabricating evidence and creating the story “in the Hollywood manner.”9
That digital images can be manipulated with great ease confounds the asso-
ciation of photography with the documentation of truth. At the same time, the
proliferation of proven-false images in the news media and on social media has
produced a much more skeptical viewing public. In 2014, Dutch graphic designer
Zilla van den Born explored this tension between the truth value of the image and
its capacity for manipulation when as a school project she spent five weeks on a
“vacation” in Asia, during which she was in fact at home using Photoshop to create
and post vacation photos. Inserting herself into typical tourist scenes, group shots,
and beach scenes in photographs she shared on social media, Skyping with fake
backgrounds, and sending fake postcards, van den Born created a photographic
portfolio of her travel adventures without ever leaving her apartment. Here she
poses herself on a beach in a typical tourist scene. After the “trip” was over, van
den Born let her family and friends in on the secret, titling her project Sjezus zeg,
Zilla (“Oh God, Zilla”). “My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to
distort reality,” she states. “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate
what we show on social media.”10
It is a paradox of photography that although we know that FIG. 1.13
images can be ambiguous and are easily altered (as van den Born’s Photograph from Oh God, Zilla,
Zilla van den Born, 2014
project shows), much of photography’s power still lies in the
shared belief that photographs are, or should be,
truthful records of events. The increasing prev-
alence of documenting the documenter, which
we saw in the Weegee car trunk photograph,
reaffirms photography’s provenance and truth
claims. The interweaving into visual culture of
tracking programs that document our travel his-
tory and activities on our Facebook pages and in
our mobile phone archives also helps to uphold,
surveil, and affirm a culture of photographic
truth and objectivity. Seeing that someone’s
Facebook settings have led the program to tag
their photograph as having been taken in a given
city on a given date lends veracity to the photo-
graph, confirming from a source other than the

Images, Power, and Politics

I
27
 FIG. 1.14 photographer that the circumstances were not faked. Our aware-
Robert Frank, Trolley—New
ness of the subjective nature of imaging is in constant tension with
­Orleans, 1955 (gelatin silver print)
the legacy of objectivity that clings to the cameras and software that
together produce images and data about us and our world.
French theorist Roland Barthes uses the term studium to describe this truth
function of the photograph. The order of the studium also refers to the photo-
graph’s ability to invoke a distanced appreciation of what the image holds. Yet
­photographs are also objects with subjective, emotional value and meaning. They
can channel feelings and affect in ways that often seem magical, or at least highly
personal and interiorized. Barthes coined the term punctum, a Greek word for
trauma, to characterize the affective element of those photographs that pierce one’s
heart with feeling. Photography is thus paradoxical: the same photograph can be
an emotional object (conveying its sharp and immediate punctum), yet it can also
serve as measured documentary evidence of facts (through the more distanced
studium by which the image invites us to regard what it shows). Photographic
meaning derives precisely from this paradoxical combination of magical and objec-
tive qualities. Artist and theorist Allan Sekula proposed this back in the predigital
1980s: “photographs achieve semantic status as fetish objects and as documents.
The photograph has, depending on its context, a power that is primarily affective
and a power that is primarily informative. Both powers support the mythical truth-
value of the photograph.”11 The images created by cameras can be simultaneously
informative and expressive.
This 1955 photograph of passengers on a segregated trolley car reflects this para-
dox. It was taken by Robert Frank in New Orleans while traveling around the United
States between 1955 and 1957, funded by two Guggenheim fellowships awarded
to him to document American life. Eighty-three photographs selected from 687
rolls of film (more than 20,000 photographs) were published in The ­Americans,

28 I Images, Power, and Politics

a photographic essay with an introduction by the Beat poet Jack Kerouac.12 In this
photograph, Trolley—New Orleans, we see individual passengers: a white man and
a white woman are seated near the front, a white boy and girl occupy the middle
seat, and a black man and a black women sit further back in the trolley car. As factual
evidence of the past, the image records a particular moment in the racially segregated
American South of the 1950s when blacks were required by law to sit in the rear
on public transportation, leaving the front seats for white passengers. Yet, at the
same time, this photograph does more than document these particular facts about
racial hierarchy that are made so clear in what was a mundane, everyday arrangement
of people. For some viewers, this image is moving insofar as it captures a fleeting
moment in a culture on the precipice of momentous change, evoking powerful emo-
tions about America’s racial divide. The picture was taken just as laws, policies, and
social mores concerning segregation began to undergo radical changes in response to
civil rights activism. In Frank’s photograph, the passengers’ faces look outward with
different expressions, appearing to wait not only for their destination but also for the
larger social changes soon to come that would make the organization of people in this
trolley no longer fall quite this way. It is as if the trolley itself represents the passage
of history, and the expressive faces of each passenger frozen in a fleeting moment
of transit foreshadow the ways in which all Americans will confront the history that
will ensue. We can thus read the image as a kind of allegory, an instance from this
historical moment before dramatic changes in the American racial landscape. This
photograph is thus valuable both as an empirical documentary image of what has
been and as an expressive, symbolic vehicle conveying social transformation.

Myth, Connotation, and the Meaning of Images

In Trolley—New Orleans, as in all images, we can discern multiple levels of mean-
ing. Here, the interpretive analytic system of semiotics can help us to understand
how meaning is generated. Barthes uses the terms denotative and connotative to
describe different kinds and levels of meaning produced at the same time and for the
same viewer in the same photograph. An image can denote certain apparent truths,
providing documentary evidence of objective circumstances. The denotative mean-
ing of the image refers to its literal, explicit meaning. The same photograph may
connote more culturally specific associations and meanings. Connotative meanings
are informed by the cultural and historical contexts of the image and its viewers’
lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances—all that the image means to them
personally and socially. As we noted earlier, the Robert Frank photograph denotes
a group of passengers on a trolley. Yet, its meaning is broader than this simple
description. This image connotes a collective journey of life and race relations in
the American South in the 1950s. A viewer’s cultural and historical knowledge that
1955 is the same year as the Montgomery bus boycotts and that the photograph was
taken shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education deseg-
regation ruling contributes to the photograph’s connotative messages, bringing in

Images, Power, and Politics

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29
 the cultural connotations of the trolley as an emblem of social change. Yet a viewer
would have to have specific historical knowledge to recognize the trolley image as
connotative of a particular historical journey. The dividing line between what an
image denotes and what it connotes can be ambiguous, and connotative meanings
can change over time and with shifts in social context. All meanings and mes-
sages are culturally informed—there is no such thing as a purely denotative image.
The two concepts, denotation and connotation, can be useful, however, because
they help us to think about the ways in which images function both narrowly to
signify literal, denoted meanings and expansively to connote culturally and contex-
tually specific meanings.
Connotation is a primary means through which images convey values. Barthes
uses the term myth to refer to the cultural values and beliefs that are expressed
through connotation.13 In this use of the term, myth refers to how images work ideo-
logically (a concept we discuss in the next section). For Barthes, myth is the hidden
set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are specific to certain
groups, are made to seem natural, universal, and given for a whole society. Myth
allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image to appear as denota-
tive (that is, literal or natural). To demonstrate this concept, Barthes interprets this
1955 cover of Paris Match, a popular magazine. At this time, France was fighting to
retain its colonial power in Algeria, after having promised to grant its independence.
The cover photograph is a close-up on the face of an African boy in a French mil-
itary uniform. He is saluting. Its caption reads: “The nights of the army. Little Diouf
has come from Ouagadougou [now Burkina Faso] with his comrades, children reared
by the A.O.F. [French West African] army to open the fantastic
FIG. 1.15
spectacle that the French Army presents this week at the Palais
Paris Match, no. 326, June 25–
July 2, 1955 des Sports.”14 The image, Barthes proposes, does not simply
present a boy saluting. It engages in and amplifies a larger myth
about the universal greatness of French nationalism and
colonial imperialism. The boy’s eyes are uplifted, sug-
gesting he is saluting a French flag flying above. This,
Barthes notes, is the basic meaning of the picture. But
also connoted is the idea “that France is a great Empire,
that all her sons, without any colour discrimination,
faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better
answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than
the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called
oppressors.”15 This connoted message, Barthes pro-
poses, is targeted at a French reader, in whom the photo-
graph will foster the feeling that French imperialism and
paternalism in Africa are natural, given conditions and
not the outcomes of contestation and historical power
struggles.

30 I Images, Power, and Politics

 Image codes change meaning in different con-
texts. For instance, the representation of smiles
has meant many things throughout history. The
Mona Lisa, for example, is famous in part for Leonardo
da Vinci’s rendering of the model’s smile, which has
been widely described as enigmatic, as if the model
were hiding a secret. The “smiley face” that emerged
in the 1960s has largely been understood as a symbol
of happiness. This symbol, which proliferated on but-
tons and T-shirts in the late twentieth century, also
inspired the common emoticon practice that first
appeared in the use of punctuation in email to signify
a smile :-) and then became the basis for the smiley
face emoticons available as cell phone fonts. Yet
what a smile means depends on context. Is the little
boy in The First Murder smiling or grimacing? How does the FIG. 1.16
Yue Minjun, Butterfly, 2007 (oil on
context, which we learn from the related photographs and from
canvas, 100 × 80 cm)
the written history of Weegee’s practice, help us to determine
the meaning of the boy’s expression?
Chinese artist Yue Minjun has created paintings evoking “symbolic smiles,”
making reference to the images and sculptures of laughing Buddha and ironically
commenting on the smile as a mask. The smiles in Yue’s paintings seem to rise
from anxiety, stretched across faces in painful caricature, con-
FIG. 1.17
noting the irony, folly, and artificial sincerity of everyday life.
Smiling Buddha on rocks with
We can infer these connotations from his painting Butterfly, a sack and rosary, eighteenth-­
with its exaggerated smiles, distorted faces, horned heads, and century Qing dynasty porcelain
figure
strange and naked red bodies, which are all juxtaposed with
colorful butterflies, suggesting the famous “butterfly dream”
described in a poem about transformation by the Taoist
philosopher Zhuang Zhou in which a man’s passing
dream of being a happy butterfly is confused with real-
ity. We can also learn more about those connotations by
finding out about the cultural meanings of the smile in
China and about the artist himself, whose work is part
of the Chinese art movement of cynical realism, as well
as by consulting sources on both modern and traditional
China, Chinese painting, and the legacies of the laughing
Buddha and Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly poem. Whereas the
Buddha is laughing in contentment, Yue’s figures seem
to be smiling in anxiety or even agony. These are very
­different smiles from the generic smiley-face grin or the
enigmatic, barely turned-up lips of the Mona Lisa.

Images, Power, and Politics

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31
 Semiotics and Signs
Our discussion of the layers of meaning in images and the differing meaning of smiles
draws from semiotics. Every time we interpret an image (to understand what it signi-
fies), whether consciously or not, we are using the tools of semiotics. The principles
of semiotics were formulated by the American scientist and philosopher Charles Sand-
ers Peirce in the late nineteenth century and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
in the early twentieth century. Both proposed important linguistic theories that were
adapted in the mid-twentieth century for use in image analysis. Saussure’s writing,
however, has had the most influence on the theories of structuralism that inform
the ways of analyzing visual culture discussed in this book. Language, according
to ­Saussure, is like a game of chess. It depends on conventions and codes for its
meanings. At the same time, Saussure argued, the relationship between words (or the
sound of words when spoken) and things in the world is arbitrary and relative, not
fixed. For example, the words dog in English, chien in French, and Hund in German all
refer to the same kind of animal; hence, the relationship between the words and the
animal itself is dictated by language conventions rather than by some natural connec-
tion. Meanings change according to context and to language rules.
Charles Sanders Peirce (whose name is pronounced “purse”) introduced the
idea of a science of signs shortly before Saussure. Peirce believed that language and
thought are processes of sign interpretation. For Peirce, meaning resides not in our
initial perception of a sign or representation but in our interpretation of the percep-
tion and subsequent action based on that perception. For example, we perceive an
octagonal red sign with the letters STOP inscribed. The meaning lies in our interpre-
tation of the sign and subsequent action (we stop).
There have been many revisions to semiotics, but it nonetheless remains an
important method of visual analysis. We choose in this book to use Barthes’s and
Saussure’s model of semiotics because it offers a clear and direct way to understand
the relationship between visual representations and meaning. In Barthes’s model, in
addition to the earlier-discussed denotative and connotative levels of meaning, there
is the sign, which is composed of the signifier—a sound, written word, or image—
and the signified, which is the concept evoked by that word or image. In the familiar
smiley face icon, the smile is the signifier, and happiness is the signified. In the Yue
painting, the smile is the signifier, and anxiety is the signified. The image (or word)
and its meaning together (the signifier and signified together) form the sign.

Image/sound/word   Signifier
SIGN
Meaning      Signified

For Saussure, the signifier is the entity that represents, and the sign is the combination
of the signifier and what it means. As we have seen with these two different images
of smiles, an image or word can have many meanings and constitute many signs in

32 I Images, Power, and Politics

Saussure’s use of that term. The production of a sign is dependent on social, histor-
ical, and cultural context. It is also dependent on the context in which the image is
presented (in a museum gallery or a magazine, for instance) and on the viewers who
interpret it. We live in a world of signs, and it is our interpretive labor that makes the
signifier–signified relationship fluid and active in the production of signs and meaning.
Our interpretation of images depends on historical context and our cultural
knowledge—the conventions the images use or play off of, the other images they
refer to, and the familiar figures and symbols they include. As conventions, signs
can be a kind of shorthand language for viewers, and we are often incited to feel that
the relationship between a signifier and signified is natural. For instance, we are so
accustomed to identifying a rose with the concept of romantic love and a dove with
peace that it is difficult to recognize that their relationship is constructed and cultur-
ally specific rather than natural. The very fact that the sign is divided into a signifier
and a signified allows us to see that images can convey many different meanings.
Another way to look at this is to see that images’ meanings are produced accord-
ing to social and aesthetic conventions and codes. Conventions are like road signs:
we must learn their codes for them to make sense, and the codes we learn become
second nature. Company logos operate according to this principle of instant recog-
nition, counting on the fact that the denotative meaning (the swoosh equals Nike)
will slide into connotative meanings (the swoosh means quality, coolness) that
will enhance the brand’s value. We decode images by interpreting clues pointing
to intended, unintended, and even merely suggested meanings. These clues may be
formal elements such as color, shading, tone, contrast, composition, depth, perspec-
tive, and style of address. Even seemingly neutral elements such as tone and color
can take on cultural meanings. We also interpret images according to their sociohis-
torical contexts. For example, we may consider when and where the image was made
or the social context in which it is presented. An image appearing as a work of art
in a museum takes on quite a different meaning when it is reproduced in an adver-
tisement. We are trained to read for
cultural codes signifying gendered,
racial, or class-specific meanings.
The creation of meaning in any
given image is thus derived from
many different factors, both within
and in the context of the image.
This 2008 ad from the World Wild-
life Fund illustrates how an image’s
meaning is often derived from a

FIG. 1.18
World Wildlife Fund ad, TBWA
Paris, 2008

Images, Power, and Politics

I
33
 combination of signs. Here, the image of trees in the shape of a lung constructs a
message about deforestation that combines several signs to create a visual impact.
The lush, green quality of the meadows and trees signifies aliveness, fertility, and
life, and the shape of the trees will be read by most viewers as evoking the shape of
the human lungs. The combination of these signs, forest as life and forest as lungs,
makes a connection between the trees and the capacity of the planet to breathe.
Yet, the message of the image is derived from the disturbingly brown section of the
“lung” of trees on the right, which depict deforestation and, as a consequence, a
loss of the carbon dioxide–reducing trees that keep the atmosphere at an equilib-
rium. A disease or cancer of the earth is suggested: the earth will increasingly have
trouble breathing. Importantly, the ad does this through visual codes, rather than
the use of text. It contains only a short tagline, “Before it’s too late,” but the image
itself has already conveyed the sense of time running out, since, by implication, the
brown area of the forest lung will overtake the healthy green sections.
Our interpretation of this image as one of interlocking signs uses semiotics to
describe an interpretative process that we use every day. We use many tools to
interpret images and we often use these tools automatically. As such, semiotics
names the kind of image interpretation that we do all the time without thinking too
much about it. In images, meaning is often derived through the combination of text
and image. This is particularly the case in ads and political posters that direct the
viewer’s interpretation to a particular meaning through a double take—the image
first looks a certain way and then changes meaning with the addition of the text.
We can see this at work in this anti-smoking ad that plays
FIG. 1.19 off the symbols of the Marlboro cigarette ads. Marlboro advertise-
Anti-smoking ad for the California ments are known for their equation of the brand with ­masculinity:
Health Department, Asher and
Partners, 1997
Marlboro (signifier) + masculinity (signified)  = ­Marlboro as
masculinity (sign). The cowboy is featured on horseback or just

34 I Images, Power, and Politics

relaxing with a smoke, surrounded by natural beauty evocative of the unspoiled
American West. These advertisements connote rugged individualism and life on
the American frontier, when men were “real” men. The Marlboro Man embodies
a romantic ideal of ­freedom that contrasts with the more confined lives of most
everyday working people. It is testimony to the power of these ads to create the
sign of Marlboro as masculinity (and the Marlboro Man as connoting a lost ideal
of masculinity) that many contemporary Marlboro ads dispense with the cowboy
altogether and simply show the landscape, in which this man exists by implication.
This ad campaign also testifies to the ways in which objects become gendered
through advertising. It is a little-known fact that Marlboro was initially marketed
as a “feminine” cigarette (with lipstick-red–tipped filters) until the 1950s, when
the Marlboro Man made his first appearance. Indeed, the Marlboro Man has long
been appropriated as a camp icon in gay male culture. In 1999, the Marlboro Man
billboard on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip was taken down and replaced by an anti-­
smoking billboard that mocked this icon of buff masculinity. This anti-smoking ad
invokes these meanings of the Marlboro Man to recraft (through its use of text) the
sign of Marlboro from one of masculinity and the West to its opposite, Marlboro
Man = loss of virility, smoking = ­disease, or Marlboro = death. Our understand-
ing of the Marlboro ad and its spoof is dependent on our knowledge that cowboys
are disappearing from the American landscape, that they are cultural symbols of a
particular ideology of American expansionism and the frontier that began to fade
with urban industrialization and modernization. We bring to these images cultural
knowledge of the changing role of men and the recognition that it indicates a fading
stereotype of masculine virility.
Whereas Barthes and Saussure deploy these core concepts of the sign, signi-
fier, and signified, Peirce works with a somewhat different model in which the sign
(which for Peirce was the word or image) is distinguished from the meaning (which
Peirce called the interpretant, which is equivalent to Barthes’s signified) but also the
object itself. Peirce’s work has remained important for looking at the distinctions
between different kinds of signs and their relationship to the real. Peirce described
three kinds of signs or representations: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. In Peirce’s
definition, iconic signs resemble their object in some way. Many paintings and draw-
ings are iconic, as are many comics, photographs, and film and television images.
We can see iconic signs at work in Marjane Satrapi’s 2003 autobiographical
graphic novel, Persepolis, which was later made into an animated film. Persepolis
tells the story of Satrapi’s childhood in Iran during the time of the Iranian Revo-
lution. Her personal life is caught up in the violent changes in Iranian society. In
this image, she depicts herself as a young girl who, with her classmates, has been
obliged to wear a veil to school. The simplicity of Satrapi’s style creates iconic
signs of the young women and their veils—we know how to read these images, in
Peirce’s terms, because they clearly resemble what they are representing. In stark
black and white, the veils command visual attention within the frame. Satrapi uses

Images, Power, and Politics

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35
 FIG. 1.20
Frame from graphic novel
visual repetition and framing to depict the homogenizing visual
­Persepolis: The Story of a effect of the girls’ veils (they all look the same), as well as to
­Childhood, Marjane Satrapi, 2003 mark herself as an individual (she appears in a separate frame).
These strategies of framing, motif, and the flattening of space
(here, the girls are situated against a blank background) are used to depict character
and psychology. The girls’ hands are all folded in unison, making clear how they
must conform in the school environment (and, by implication, in broader society).
Yet their facial expressions establish that they are all responding in different ways
(annoyance, dejection, compliance).
The veil has also been used in popular media to promote the image of the
Muslim woman as a positive and empowered figure, and not simply as an object
of oppression. The cartoon television series Burka Avenger, produced by Pakistani
rock star and activist Aaron Haroon Rashid and first airing in 2013 in Urdu, features
Jiya, a burka-wearing teacher in an all-girls’ school who is secretly a superheroine.
In this depiction, the burka is a symbol of the integrity, strength, and empower-
ment Jiya embodies as a Muslim woman.
Unlike iconic signs, which typically resemble their objects, symbolic signs,
according to Peirce, bear no obvious relationship to their objects. Symbols are cre-
ated through an arbitrary (one could say “unnatural”) alliance of an object and a
meaning. For example, languages are symbolic systems that use conventions to
establish meaning. There is no natural link between the word cat and an actual cat;
language conventions derived from Latin, Germanic, and Old English roots give the
word its signification. Symbolic signs are inevitably more restricted in their capacity
to convey meaning in that they refer to learned systems. Someone who does not
speak English, Dutch, or German will probably recognize an image of a cat (an
iconic sign), whereas the word cat (a symbolic sign) may have no obvious mean-
ing. National symbols, like flags, are also symbolic signs in Peirce’s terms, even

36 I Images, Power, and Politics

 FIG. 1.21
Screen shot from Burka Avenger,
the Urdu language television
series launched in 2013

though some flags might have iconic

or pictorial elements within them.
Our earlier point that meanings are
always contextual is well illustrated
by the 2015 U.S. debates about the flying of the Confederate flag, a controversial
symbol of southern pride that is regarded by many as a symbol of slavery. It was
this argument of the flag’s symbolic and indexical reference to slavery that led activ-
ist Brittany Ann Byuarim Newsome to climb a South Carolina flagpole and remove
the flag in June 2015. The state removed the flag from its statehouse grounds in
July 2015 (with the governor stating that it belonged in a museum rather than on a
government building), which launched a national debate about the flag’s meaning.
Peirce’s discussion of images as indexical is useful in the study of visual culture
and, in particular, photography. Indexical signs have an “existential” relationship to
their objects. This means that they have coexisted in the same place at some time.
Some examples of indexical signs include the symptom of a disease, a pointing
hand, and a weathervane. Fingerprints are indexical signs of a person, and, impor-
tantly, photographs are indexical signs that testify to the moment that the camera
was in the presence of its subject. Indeed, although photographs are both iconic
and indexical, their cultural meaning is derived in large part from their indexical
meaning as a trace of the real. The indexical quality of photographs is a key factor of
their cultural value and power. As we noted earlier, the myth of photographic truth
is related to this indexical quality. The Robert Frank photograph discussed earlier
(Fig. 1.14) carries the weight of history through its indexical quality, the sense that
it is a trace of the past. Whereas critics of the display of the Confederate flag argue
that its indexical link to slavery is real and alive, proponents of the flag’s display
argue that these indexical meanings are no longer active or significant.

Images and Ideology

To explore the meaning of images is to recognize that they are produced within
dynamics of social power and ideology. Images are an important site through which
ideologies, as systems of belief, are produced. When we think of ideology, we may
think of propaganda—the crude process of using false representations to lure people
into holding beliefs that may compromise their own interests. This understanding
of ideology assumes that to act ideologically is to act out of ignorance. In this use,
the term ideology is pejorative. However, contemporary theorists see ideology as a
much more pervasive, mundane process in which we all engage and about which

Images, Power, and Politics

I
37
 we are all aware, in some way or other. In this book we define ideologies as the
broad but indispensable shared sets of values and beliefs through which individuals
live out their complex relations in a range of social networks. Ideologies are widely
varied and intersect at all levels of all cultures, from religions to politics to fashion
choices. Our ideologies are diverse and ubiquitous; they inform our everyday lives in
often subtle and barely noticeable forms. One could say that ideology is the means
by which certain values—for example, individual freedom, progress, or the impor-
tance of family and home—are made to seem natural. Ideology is manifested in
widely shared social assumptions not only about the way things are but also about
the way things should be. Images and media representations are some of the forms
through which we engage or enlist others to share certain views or not.
Practices of looking are intimately tied to ideology. The image culture in which
we live is an arena of diverse and often conflicting ideologies. Images are elements
of contemporary advertising and consumer culture through which assumptions
about beauty, desire, glamour, and social value are both constructed and lived. Film,
television, and video games are media through which we see reinforced ­ideological
constructions such as the value of romantic love, heterosexuality, nationalism, or
traditional concepts of good and evil. Contemporary artists often critique dominant
ideologies. The most powerful aspect of ideologies is that they appear to be natural
or given, rather than part of a belief system that a culture produces to function in
a particular way. Ideologies are thus, like Barthes’s concept of myth, connotations
that appear to be natural. Visual culture is not just representation of ideologies and
power relations. It is integral to their production.
Ideologies permeate the world of entertain-
FIG. 1.22 ment. They also permeate the more mundane
Matthew Brady, carte de visite
realms of life that we do not usually associate
photograph of U.S. Cavalry Major
General George Armstrong with the word culture: science, education, med-
Custer, 1864 icine, law. All are deeply informed by the ideolo-
gies of those social institutions as they intersect
with the ideologies of a given culture’s religious
and cultural realms. Images are used, as we dis-
cuss in further chapters, for the identification
and classification of people, as evidence of dis-
ease in medicine, and as courtroom evidence.
Photography has been a medium through
which individual, family, and national values
have been affirmed and through which citizens
have been categorized and regulated by the
state. Shortly after photography was developed
in early nineteenth-century Europe, private
citizens began hiring photographers to make
individual and family portraits. Portraits often

38 I Images, Power, and Politics

marked important moments such as births, marriages, and deaths (the funerary por-
trait was a popular convention). One widespread early use of photography was to
incorporate the image into a carte de visite, or visiting card. These small cards were
used by many middle- and upper-class people in European and American societies
as calling cards featuring photographic portraits of themselves. In addition, in the
late nineteenth century there was a craze of purchasing cartes de visite of famous
people, such as the British royal family. This practice signaled the role that photo-
graphic images would play in the construction of celebrity throughout the twentieth
century. This carte de visite of U.S. General George Custer, which was taken in the
1860s, shows Custer’s image and signature, with the salutation “Truly Yours.” On
the reverse side is the name of the photo studio. Thus, in the nineteenth-century
carte de visite, the photographic portrait affirmed individuality and integrated pho-
tography into bourgeois life and its values.
Photography’s role as a form of social, cultural, and familial preservation was
aligned with this affirmation of individuality. Barthes once wrote that photographs
always indicate a kind of mortality, evoking death in the moments in which they
seem to arrest time, and that they conjure always the past, the “what has been.”16
Photographs are one of the primary means through which we remember events,
conjure up the presence of an absent person, and experience longing for someone
we have lost or someone we desire but whom we have never seen or met. They are
crucial to what we remember, but they can also enable us to forget those things
that were not photographed. With digital imaging, photogra-
FIG. 1.23
phy has lost some of its sense of “what has been” that derives
Eastman Kodak ad, 1920s
from its indexical quality. But the reason is not that the camera
does not need to be in the same place as the object
it depicts (it does, unless we are speaking of a sim-
ulation). Rather, it is that we have become so used
to the possibilities for creative manipulation of loca-
tion, proximity, and historical period, all of which
can be evoked with digital effects.
In the mid-nineteenth century, through the
proliferation of photographic studios, photogra-
phy emerged as a key family practice, as many
­middle-class people took family portraits and exhib-
ited them on their mantels. Many also took portraits
of the dead, in particular of their children who had
died. Photography thus quickly became a medium
through which family memories could be retained.
By the twentieth century, the Kodak company was
selling the idea that amateur photography, which
Kodak promoted through its consumer cameras
and film developing, should be about the family

Images, Power, and Politics

I
39
 and preserving important life moments, “Kodak Moments,” that affirmed family
coherence and continuity. Photography has thus played an important role in the
ideology of the family and the social values attached to it.
Photography’s role in affirming ideologies of family and individuality is par-
alleled by its role in affirming ideologies of social institutions, for the purposes of
categorization, management, and repression. Photo theorist Allan Sekula writes that
photography developed quickly into a medium that functions both honorifically (in
personal portraiture) and repressively (in the classifying of citizens according to racial
and ethnic categories in security surveillance images, for example). Portraiture was,
according to Sekula, the key in a system of double representation. Some portraits
affirmed the individual self in ways that ceremonies long had done, and some portraits
created a generalized look and thus defined the individual’s opposite: the pathological
type, or the racial other.17 In this second case, we can see the integral role of photog-
raphy in social repression through concepts of science, normalcy, and social order.
From the beginning of the medium in the mid-1900s, photographs were widely
regarded as tools of science and public surveillance. Astronomers used photographic
film to mark star movements. Photographs were used in hospitals, mental institu-
tions, and prisons to record and study populations, in hopes that they could be
classified and tracked over time. Indeed, in rapidly growing urban industrial centers,
photographs quickly became an important way for police and public health officials
to monitor urban populations perceived to be growing not only in numbers of people
but also in rates of crime and social deviance. We discuss the emergence of photo­
graphy as a tool of social institutionalization in Chapter 9.
FIG. 1.24
Here a man at a rally in Barcelona, Spain, is pictured hold-
A man holds a Catalan identifica-
tion card during a rally calling for ing up his own official photo-identification card. He is using the
the independence of Catalonia, Bar- state-issued card, which identifies him as Catalan, to make the
celona, Spain, September 11, 2015
case that Catalonia should be recognized as a separate state.
What is the legacy of this use of
images to manage and control pop-
ulations? Portrait images, like finger-
prints, are frequently used as personal
identification—on passports, driver’s
­
licenses, credit cards, and identification
cards in schools, in the welfare system,
and in many other social institutions.
Photographs are a primary medium of
evidence in the criminal justice system.
We are accustomed to the fact that
most stores, banks, and public places
are outfitted with surveillance cameras.
Our daily lives are tracked not only
through our credit records but also

40 I Images, Power, and Politics

through surveillance camera records of our movements and through the potential
for monitoring in social media venues such as Facebook and Twitter. One’s social
media accounts are never fully private and are always available for surveillance by
a host of sources. When we engage in social media, we encounter the potential of
being in the public eye and of being tracked. It is increasingly the norm to forgo
privacy in favor of participating in social networking, using photography as a lingua
franca across our spheres of friends, family, and coworkers.
The meaning of images, however, can change dramatically when they move
across these different social contexts. Today, the contexts in which images cir-
culate have become infinitely more complex than they were even a few decades
ago. Digital images taken on mobile phones are uploaded instantly to Facebook,
Instagram, and Flickr, videos are widely shared on YouTube and other sites, and
images are “recognized” and tagged by image software. Photographs and videos of
private moments circulate rapidly on the web and are potentially seen by millions.
This means that any given image or video might be displayed in many very different
contexts, each of which might give it different inflections and meanings. It also
means, to the dismay of many politicians and celebrities, that once images are set
loose in these image distribution networks, they cannot be fully retrieved or reg-
ulated. Even cherished and protected family photographs can become evidence in
the workplace, in law, and in the public eye long after their original circumstances.
The circulation of images is increasingly difficult to control as the means of image
reproduction and circulation proliferate with advances in networks and software.
The legal regulation of image circulation through copyright and fair use laws is an
issue we consider in Chapter 5.

Image Icons
One of the ways that we can see how images generate meaning across contexts is
to look at image icons and how they both retain and change meaning across differ-
ent contexts. Here, we use the term icon in a general sense, rather than in the spe-
cific sense used by Peirce that we discussed earlier. An icon is an image that refers
to something outside of its individual components, something (or someone) that
has great symbolic meaning for many people. Icons are often perceived to represent
universal concepts, emotions, and meanings. Thus an image produced in a specific
culture, time, and place might be interpreted as having broader meaning and the
capacity to evoke similar responses across all cultures and in all viewers.
The polar bear has become a ubiquitous icon of climate change. A particularly
iconic scene is that of a polar bear clinging to a dwindling ice floe. Melting ice is
a signifier of climate change and the clinging polar bear a signifier of endanger-
ment to life caused by a warming climate. Polar bears signify cold—a cold swim is
referred to as a polar bear dip. The endangered polar bear is thus a key signifier of
the larger array of problems caused by the earth’s climate getting warmer. Images

Images, Power, and Politics

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41
 like these are signs of the global
distress and threats to life posed
by climate change.
As our discussion of this
image shows, icons can be quite
reductive. Climate change is
obviously a complex issue that
cannot be reduced to ice melting
and polar bears in precarious sit-
uations. However, simplification
is central to the creation of icons
that can convey iconic meaning
across many different contexts.
The polar bear image resonates
around the world. In climate
justice protest marches, the
polar bear is often prominently
featured on posters, logos, even
in costumes. It has become an
icon for a global movement. One
meme that circulated widely
FIG. 1.25 among the 2014 global climate justice marches is the image of a
Polar bear on ice floe, 2005 protestor dressed as a polar bear being arrested in New York City.

FIG. 1.26
Police arrest a climate change
protester dressed in a polar bear
costume, New York City, 2014

42 I Images, Power, and Politics

 FIG. 1.27
Jeff Widener, Tank Man (aka
Unknown Protester), Tiananmen
Square, Beijing, China, 1989
Other key features of image icons are how they can cir-
culate through visual networks and how they get reworked into new images that
carry with them aspects of the original. This 1989 image of a lone student at
Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, is an icon recognized around the world. In
this historical demonstration, students led the call for democratic social reforms,
and many lost their lives. This image of the 1989 student protest became a pow-
erful icon of the demand for democracy worldwide.
The value of this image, often called Tank Man, is based in part on its cap-
turing of a special moment (it depicts a key moment in the June Fourth Incident
during which media coverage was restricted) and the speed with which it was
transmitted around the world (it was the pre-Internet era, so the image circulated
in part by fax). As a depiction of one student’s courage before the machinery of
military power, this photograph achieved worldwide recognition, becoming an icon
of political struggles for freedom of expression. Its denotative meaning is simple:
a young man stands before a tank. Its connotative and iconic meanings are com-
monly understood to be more complex and widely relevant: the importance of
individual actions in the face of injustice and the capacity of one individual to
stand up to power. This image thus has value not as a singular image (once broad-
cast, it was not one image but millions of images on TV sets and in newspapers,
though it was censored in China) but through its speed of transmission, its infor-
mative value, and its political statement, which is both specific to the protest and
more broad, capturing the individual resolve behind many democratic movements
around the world.

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