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Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials
This book is an introduction to reading visual culture. It explains which methods are available to the undergraduate student and shows exactly how to use them. The book begins with a discussion of general themes and recent debates, on the meaning of culture and the function of the visual, that offers a critical inquiry into the relation of visual images to social identities and social relations. Gillian Rose then goes on to investigate in detail the different methods for interpreting visual images. The strengths and weaknesses of each method are discussed in relation to a detailed case study, as well as to the more general issues outlined in the introduction.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 16, 2001
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September 29, 2014
This is a remarkably interesting book. We tend to like to think that because we live in a ‘visual’ society – and one that is increasingly visual in orientation (film, television, YouTube, and endless advertisements in every possible location) that the ‘language’ of images would be something that would be quite transparent to us. However, trying to work out just how to analyse images is a remarkably difficult thing. Firstly, there is the problem she highlights in the very first line of this book, “There’s an awful lot of hype around ‘the visual’ these days.” You can read the word ‘hype’ as also meaning ‘nonsense’, I think. What this book seeks to provide readers with is, “Some guidelines for investigating the meanings and effects of visual images. But the most exciting, startling and perceptive critics of visual images don’t in the end depend entirely on a sound methodology.”
The main idea here is that, “interpreting images is just that, interpretation, and not the discovery of their ‘truth’.” More about this at the end.
And there is the rub. Watch one of those art shows with an expert and a picture behind them and you could be forgiven for thinking images do have a truth that is perfectly transcribable into a verbal description overflowing with adjectives. That this is anything but the case is a good part of the reason why a book such is this is necessary.
I’m planning to use this book as part of the methodological underpinning of my PhD thesis – so this review will be a bit long and quote lots of this book – sorry about that, skip ahead as you feel you need to.
She starts by saying that there are five aspects to visual culture – images do something, even if not in a way that is easy to translate into spoken language. Images make visible or invisible social difference – she shows this by presenting a poster from the British Conservative Party of a black man wearing a dark suit with the caption, “Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British.” This leads to the third idea which is that it isn’t just important how an image looks, but rather also how it is looked at, that is, its audience, both implied and actual. This is important because images are embedded in the wider culture and therefore reflect while also helping to form that culture. And finally, not all audiences are willing to be co-opted into the world of the image – sometimes images are ‘a site of resistance and recalcitrance’.
Therefore, a critical response to images would do three things: take images seriously – that is, would involve looking carefully and closely at images; would think about the social conditions and effects the image has; and finally, would be self-reflexive and acknowledge that images can very often be mirrors rather than windows. (that’s mine, by the way, and I’m rather impressed with it)
She likes to count – and so there are also three sites where an image gets its meaning. There is the site of production, the site of the image itself (what the image literally shows) and finally the site where the image is seen. And these lead her to three modalities that help define the image, the technical (from oil paint to computer pixels), the compositional (“formal strategies of content, colour and spatial organisation etc”) and the social (“the economic, social and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image”)
All images are produced – they are made in one way or another and how they are made has something important to say about the meaning of the image. The problem is that our culture is so obsessed with the individual that we often confuse the making of the image with the maker of the image. We fall into the trap of ‘auteur theory’ – the idea that “what is most important about a visual image is what its maker intended to show”. Gillian does not fall into that trap – she is much more interested in what the image itself shows and how it is viewed. How do the various elements that go to make up the image, particularly how the various visual components are brought together so as to make a coherent whole, work and why do they work? To answer those questions you need a method of looking at images – and that is pretty much what the rest of the book is about.
The first method discussed is called the ‘good eye’. It is a compositional interpretation of the image and I guess this has the obvious limitation in that it implies a deep understanding of ‘high art’ and so has a kind of snobbishness associated with it. But the main benefit of this approach is that it is obsessively concerned with the image itself. And, as she repeatedly points out, it is impossible to spend too much time looking at the images you are going to interpret. You want to look at the composition of the image and this is going to involve looking at its content (what it actually shows), its colour (because colour has meaning and it is described in terms of saturation – high, vivid or low, neutral – hue - the colours actually used – and value – where low is dark and high is light) and its spatial composition.
“All images have their space organised in some way” and that means both within the images itself and in how it places the audience that views the image. Central to how space is used, particularly in Western art, is the idea of perspective, or how a two dimensional image is made to look like it represents a three dimensional space. “Perspective depends on a geometry of rays of vision, and your eyes is central to this geometry.”
Working out how the perspective of the image – essentially the horizon line – places the viewer says much about how the image is to be read. If it has a high horizon line you will be looking ‘up’ at the image and this might tend to diminish you as a viewer – infantilise you. The only painting I liked at this year’s Archibald Prize was this one - http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/medi... which does exactly that. But since the subject is a paediatrician, I thought this made the portrait make much more intelligent than the cartoon that won the prize.
Depth of focus is also a current fascination of mine – an image’s ability to tell you what to look at, what to focus on, really is interesting. As much for what it tell you is not important, but is also seen.
The next way of seeing is content analysis – or, as she says, counting what you see. This process seeks objectivity – which in itself isn’t a bad thing in what is all too often a very ‘subjective’ study. Naturally, it can go overboard – but I do think it gives some ‘grounding’ to any study to use some of the methods outlined here. The first issue involves selecting your images. In this chapter she looks at some research that was done on how National Geographic frames other cultures as either ‘like us’ or as ‘primitive and close to nature’, but rarely anything in between. It would hardly be practical to analyse every image that ever appeared in National Geographic, but that then raises the issue of how do you select the ones you are going to look at? One way is to have a ‘randomised’ method – where you number the pictures and then have a random number table that tells you which pictures to pick. Another method is referred to as ‘stratified’ in that you pick a subgroup of images and then decide on a sampling strategy that matches the selection of images from that subgroup. The next is referred to as systemic – that is, you pick every forth image or every image in every forth edition. The final is called cluster, where you choose groups at random and then sample only from those.
The main thing here is the categories you use for coding, and this has all the fun of Foucault’s Order of Things and Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. The categories you choose are going to determine what you will see. The best of this method is that this ought to be made fairly explicit – the categories need to be literally explicit and that should alert the viewer to any problems. However, we quickly become part of the world that our categories define, so there are problems here that really do need some deep thought before we start and even after we have started.
Coding images according to these categories is also a real problem. I’ve been looking at how girls are represented in school prospectuses and one of the problems I’ve found that I really didn’t anticipate was how hard it is sometimes to tell if a child is a boy or a girl. How you code should be independently verifiable and this can only be the case if you get someone else to code the images according to the categories you pick independently of you, and then see what results they get in comparison to you.
The last issue here is analysis – generally this amounts to frequency counts, but frequency doesn’t really tell you all that much sometimes. For example, I started off counting how many girls appeared in images, but it quickly became obvious that you could have twice as many boys in a picture and the picture would still be about the girls. Qualitative analysis here is impossible to avoid.
This kind of analysis has its limits, but it does show patterns that would be very hard to see otherwise – the details of the study of National Geographic, particularly in linking it to the race stuff going on in the US at the time, makes this point particularly clearly.
Semiology is the next chapter and, as she says, it is “centrally concerned with the social effects of meaning”. There is a nice introduction to Saussure and the relationship between the sign, the signified and the signifier and the issue of denotation and connotation. Then how all of these fit into the ‘code’ – “a set of conventionalised ways of making meaning that are specific to particular groups of people.” Basic take away here is that there are signs that are made up of what is signified – something that exists in the world – and what it is signified by – a word or image. These are linked together by codes, or ways of knowing, and because there is an arbitrary, but socially conventional, link between the signifier and the signified, signs can be made to ‘comment’ on each other – that is, transfer their meanings between each other.
That said, a semiological analysis is one where we:
“Decide what the signs are,
Decide what they signify in themselves,
Think about how they relate to other signs both within the images … and in other images,
Then explore their connections (and the connections of the connections) to wider systems of meaning, from codes to dominant codes, referent systems or mythologies,
And then return to the signs via their codes to explore the precise articulation of ideology and mythology.”
Simple.
It is important to remember that signs have multiple meanings (referred to here as polysemy) and the meaning you ‘get’ might be one that is of least interest. She repeatedly says that the socially preferred meanings are going to be those of the ruling class and that “images retain the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted on them.”
What is also important here is to think about how the image positions the viewer in many ways, but particularly how it positions them as potentially ‘inside’ the image. And how the image is understood in relation to the text around the image.
The next chapter was on psychoanalysis and I found it much less interesting. Mostly it focused on the castration complex – where women are castrated males – and I found that all a bit daft. Nevertheless, there was a lot of stuff on woman being a text on display for the male gaze – and I think that says much about our culture and how we need to view images if we are to understand them.
The next two chapters look at Foucault and his ideas of intertextuality, discourse and institutional power and surveillance.
“Discourse has quite a specific meaning. It refers to groups of statement which structure the way a thing is thought, and the way we act on the basis of that thinking.”
“Intertextuality refers to the way that meanings of any one discursive image or text depend not only on that one text or image, but also on the meanings carried by other images and texts”. This causes a problem, as to understand any single image or text it helps to also understand every other image or text. Each feeds each. The point is to find the richest sources of intertextual significance – but that is, obviously, easier said than done.
“Discourse disciplines subjects into certain ways of thinking and action, but this is not simply repressive; it does not impose rules for thought and behaviour on a pre-existing human agent. Instead, human subjects are produced through discourses.” And. “Power is everywhere, since discourse is everywhere.”
The point is to find the specific social circumstances in which a particular images fits within a particular general discourse (always a discourse of power) and to see what that says about that power relationship.
The second way of doing discourse analysis is to look at surveillance. Images often tell us how we ought to live and therefore how we ought to control ourselves. The best way I can think to explain this is a psychological experiment where they had an honour system in a tearoom - you can have a biscuit, but you need to put some money into a jar if you do. Well, after a week they counted up the missing biscuits and then matched it to the money. What they found was that if they had an image of a flower or something innocuous above the biscuit tin then people would tend to cheat more than if you have pictures of people above the honour jar that were looking (however uncritically) at the people taking the biscuits. Surveillance – particularly of a kind which is essentially ‘self-surveillance’ – is terribly important to Foucault, as it shows how institutions impose their power on people in ways that are not immediately obvious or obnoxious.
The final chapter is on mixing up the methods and the benefits of using more than one – although, really it is mostly about finding better ways to focus on audiences and to decide how they see the images. This is a terribly difficult problem – she suggests two means of doing this, interviews or ethnographic studies, but both have their problems. One of the main issues here is what I’d call the Wordsworth issue. We do love to think we are the only people capable of bringing to the fore the ‘truth’ of what we see. If this book is about anything it is about bringing a little modesty to the process of the analysis of images.
And that, my friends, can’t be a bad thing.
The main idea here is that, “interpreting images is just that, interpretation, and not the discovery of their ‘truth’.” More about this at the end.
And there is the rub. Watch one of those art shows with an expert and a picture behind them and you could be forgiven for thinking images do have a truth that is perfectly transcribable into a verbal description overflowing with adjectives. That this is anything but the case is a good part of the reason why a book such is this is necessary.
I’m planning to use this book as part of the methodological underpinning of my PhD thesis – so this review will be a bit long and quote lots of this book – sorry about that, skip ahead as you feel you need to.
She starts by saying that there are five aspects to visual culture – images do something, even if not in a way that is easy to translate into spoken language. Images make visible or invisible social difference – she shows this by presenting a poster from the British Conservative Party of a black man wearing a dark suit with the caption, “Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British.” This leads to the third idea which is that it isn’t just important how an image looks, but rather also how it is looked at, that is, its audience, both implied and actual. This is important because images are embedded in the wider culture and therefore reflect while also helping to form that culture. And finally, not all audiences are willing to be co-opted into the world of the image – sometimes images are ‘a site of resistance and recalcitrance’.
Therefore, a critical response to images would do three things: take images seriously – that is, would involve looking carefully and closely at images; would think about the social conditions and effects the image has; and finally, would be self-reflexive and acknowledge that images can very often be mirrors rather than windows. (that’s mine, by the way, and I’m rather impressed with it)
She likes to count – and so there are also three sites where an image gets its meaning. There is the site of production, the site of the image itself (what the image literally shows) and finally the site where the image is seen. And these lead her to three modalities that help define the image, the technical (from oil paint to computer pixels), the compositional (“formal strategies of content, colour and spatial organisation etc”) and the social (“the economic, social and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image”)
All images are produced – they are made in one way or another and how they are made has something important to say about the meaning of the image. The problem is that our culture is so obsessed with the individual that we often confuse the making of the image with the maker of the image. We fall into the trap of ‘auteur theory’ – the idea that “what is most important about a visual image is what its maker intended to show”. Gillian does not fall into that trap – she is much more interested in what the image itself shows and how it is viewed. How do the various elements that go to make up the image, particularly how the various visual components are brought together so as to make a coherent whole, work and why do they work? To answer those questions you need a method of looking at images – and that is pretty much what the rest of the book is about.
The first method discussed is called the ‘good eye’. It is a compositional interpretation of the image and I guess this has the obvious limitation in that it implies a deep understanding of ‘high art’ and so has a kind of snobbishness associated with it. But the main benefit of this approach is that it is obsessively concerned with the image itself. And, as she repeatedly points out, it is impossible to spend too much time looking at the images you are going to interpret. You want to look at the composition of the image and this is going to involve looking at its content (what it actually shows), its colour (because colour has meaning and it is described in terms of saturation – high, vivid or low, neutral – hue - the colours actually used – and value – where low is dark and high is light) and its spatial composition.
“All images have their space organised in some way” and that means both within the images itself and in how it places the audience that views the image. Central to how space is used, particularly in Western art, is the idea of perspective, or how a two dimensional image is made to look like it represents a three dimensional space. “Perspective depends on a geometry of rays of vision, and your eyes is central to this geometry.”
Working out how the perspective of the image – essentially the horizon line – places the viewer says much about how the image is to be read. If it has a high horizon line you will be looking ‘up’ at the image and this might tend to diminish you as a viewer – infantilise you. The only painting I liked at this year’s Archibald Prize was this one - http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/medi... which does exactly that. But since the subject is a paediatrician, I thought this made the portrait make much more intelligent than the cartoon that won the prize.
Depth of focus is also a current fascination of mine – an image’s ability to tell you what to look at, what to focus on, really is interesting. As much for what it tell you is not important, but is also seen.
The next way of seeing is content analysis – or, as she says, counting what you see. This process seeks objectivity – which in itself isn’t a bad thing in what is all too often a very ‘subjective’ study. Naturally, it can go overboard – but I do think it gives some ‘grounding’ to any study to use some of the methods outlined here. The first issue involves selecting your images. In this chapter she looks at some research that was done on how National Geographic frames other cultures as either ‘like us’ or as ‘primitive and close to nature’, but rarely anything in between. It would hardly be practical to analyse every image that ever appeared in National Geographic, but that then raises the issue of how do you select the ones you are going to look at? One way is to have a ‘randomised’ method – where you number the pictures and then have a random number table that tells you which pictures to pick. Another method is referred to as ‘stratified’ in that you pick a subgroup of images and then decide on a sampling strategy that matches the selection of images from that subgroup. The next is referred to as systemic – that is, you pick every forth image or every image in every forth edition. The final is called cluster, where you choose groups at random and then sample only from those.
The main thing here is the categories you use for coding, and this has all the fun of Foucault’s Order of Things and Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. The categories you choose are going to determine what you will see. The best of this method is that this ought to be made fairly explicit – the categories need to be literally explicit and that should alert the viewer to any problems. However, we quickly become part of the world that our categories define, so there are problems here that really do need some deep thought before we start and even after we have started.
Coding images according to these categories is also a real problem. I’ve been looking at how girls are represented in school prospectuses and one of the problems I’ve found that I really didn’t anticipate was how hard it is sometimes to tell if a child is a boy or a girl. How you code should be independently verifiable and this can only be the case if you get someone else to code the images according to the categories you pick independently of you, and then see what results they get in comparison to you.
The last issue here is analysis – generally this amounts to frequency counts, but frequency doesn’t really tell you all that much sometimes. For example, I started off counting how many girls appeared in images, but it quickly became obvious that you could have twice as many boys in a picture and the picture would still be about the girls. Qualitative analysis here is impossible to avoid.
This kind of analysis has its limits, but it does show patterns that would be very hard to see otherwise – the details of the study of National Geographic, particularly in linking it to the race stuff going on in the US at the time, makes this point particularly clearly.
Semiology is the next chapter and, as she says, it is “centrally concerned with the social effects of meaning”. There is a nice introduction to Saussure and the relationship between the sign, the signified and the signifier and the issue of denotation and connotation. Then how all of these fit into the ‘code’ – “a set of conventionalised ways of making meaning that are specific to particular groups of people.” Basic take away here is that there are signs that are made up of what is signified – something that exists in the world – and what it is signified by – a word or image. These are linked together by codes, or ways of knowing, and because there is an arbitrary, but socially conventional, link between the signifier and the signified, signs can be made to ‘comment’ on each other – that is, transfer their meanings between each other.
That said, a semiological analysis is one where we:
“Decide what the signs are,
Decide what they signify in themselves,
Think about how they relate to other signs both within the images … and in other images,
Then explore their connections (and the connections of the connections) to wider systems of meaning, from codes to dominant codes, referent systems or mythologies,
And then return to the signs via their codes to explore the precise articulation of ideology and mythology.”
Simple.
It is important to remember that signs have multiple meanings (referred to here as polysemy) and the meaning you ‘get’ might be one that is of least interest. She repeatedly says that the socially preferred meanings are going to be those of the ruling class and that “images retain the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted on them.”
What is also important here is to think about how the image positions the viewer in many ways, but particularly how it positions them as potentially ‘inside’ the image. And how the image is understood in relation to the text around the image.
The next chapter was on psychoanalysis and I found it much less interesting. Mostly it focused on the castration complex – where women are castrated males – and I found that all a bit daft. Nevertheless, there was a lot of stuff on woman being a text on display for the male gaze – and I think that says much about our culture and how we need to view images if we are to understand them.
The next two chapters look at Foucault and his ideas of intertextuality, discourse and institutional power and surveillance.
“Discourse has quite a specific meaning. It refers to groups of statement which structure the way a thing is thought, and the way we act on the basis of that thinking.”
“Intertextuality refers to the way that meanings of any one discursive image or text depend not only on that one text or image, but also on the meanings carried by other images and texts”. This causes a problem, as to understand any single image or text it helps to also understand every other image or text. Each feeds each. The point is to find the richest sources of intertextual significance – but that is, obviously, easier said than done.
“Discourse disciplines subjects into certain ways of thinking and action, but this is not simply repressive; it does not impose rules for thought and behaviour on a pre-existing human agent. Instead, human subjects are produced through discourses.” And. “Power is everywhere, since discourse is everywhere.”
The point is to find the specific social circumstances in which a particular images fits within a particular general discourse (always a discourse of power) and to see what that says about that power relationship.
The second way of doing discourse analysis is to look at surveillance. Images often tell us how we ought to live and therefore how we ought to control ourselves. The best way I can think to explain this is a psychological experiment where they had an honour system in a tearoom - you can have a biscuit, but you need to put some money into a jar if you do. Well, after a week they counted up the missing biscuits and then matched it to the money. What they found was that if they had an image of a flower or something innocuous above the biscuit tin then people would tend to cheat more than if you have pictures of people above the honour jar that were looking (however uncritically) at the people taking the biscuits. Surveillance – particularly of a kind which is essentially ‘self-surveillance’ – is terribly important to Foucault, as it shows how institutions impose their power on people in ways that are not immediately obvious or obnoxious.
The final chapter is on mixing up the methods and the benefits of using more than one – although, really it is mostly about finding better ways to focus on audiences and to decide how they see the images. This is a terribly difficult problem – she suggests two means of doing this, interviews or ethnographic studies, but both have their problems. One of the main issues here is what I’d call the Wordsworth issue. We do love to think we are the only people capable of bringing to the fore the ‘truth’ of what we see. If this book is about anything it is about bringing a little modesty to the process of the analysis of images.
And that, my friends, can’t be a bad thing.
August 4, 2020
This book presents a wide variety of research approaches to visual media. Each approach gets a chapter (discourse analysis is the exception--it gets two chapters). This book would work really well as an introductory textbook to the field. Students can gain exposure to the different approaches, find the one that suits their research interests, and then move on to the further readings provided at the end of the chapter to gain more in depth knowledge of their approach of choice.
August 11, 2018
Easily the least pretentious, most accessible, most up-to-date, and theoretically complete book I've read on visual methodologies so far. Furthermore, lots of good citations here that make referencing the more applicable methods a lot faster.
If you do theory-driven visual methods research, start with this book!
If you do theory-driven visual methods research, start with this book!
March 30, 2024
خاطرات مطالعات آزمون جامه در عید ۴۰۳
کاش زبان اصلی رو وقت میکردم بخونم، اما یکی از عجیبترین ترجمههایی که در چند وقت اخیر دیدم. دایجسیس رو توضیح ترجمه کرده و توصیف فیلم سرگیجه رو نوشته پنجره پشتی و کلی نکتههای دیگه اینجوری، هزاردرصد ترجمه جهرمی رو پیشنهاد نمیکنم اما کتاب به عنوان راهنما و کتاب درسی کتاب بدی نیس خیلی خسته کننده نیست و اطلاعات لازم رو با کیس استادیهای مناسب میگه
کاش زبان اصلی رو وقت میکردم بخونم، اما یکی از عجیبترین ترجمههایی که در چند وقت اخیر دیدم. دایجسیس رو توضیح ترجمه کرده و توصیف فیلم سرگیجه رو نوشته پنجره پشتی و کلی نکتههای دیگه اینجوری، هزاردرصد ترجمه جهرمی رو پیشنهاد نمیکنم اما کتاب به عنوان راهنما و کتاب درسی کتاب بدی نیس خیلی خسته کننده نیست و اطلاعات لازم رو با کیس استادیهای مناسب میگه
October 11, 2011
"The construction of scientific knowledges about the world has become more and more based on images rather than on written texts." (Stafford: 1991)
We live in an incredibly visual culture, and Rose argues that because of its centrality to our Western culture, that there is a need to understand how to analyse images that deeply impact how we interact in our world, and to understand what influences our own analysis and relationship to the images we are researching.
One cannot help but be somewhat challenged by Rose's treatment in this book of visual methodologies, and in the context where we are increasingly being overwhelmed by a visual culture that allows considerable openness to how we interpret what we see, we must question whether or not we are run the risk of foregoing truth at the expense of accepting how different people interpret the same image differently. In other words, what we see or are perhaps watching on a television report may be somewhat factual, but not necessarily wholly truthful. Furthermore, what we see, is being interpreted through the lens of the reporter and scrutinised even further by our own worldview.
This is not your standard book on research methods, but a thoughtful and helpful review on how to use visual materials successfully for research.
We live in an incredibly visual culture, and Rose argues that because of its centrality to our Western culture, that there is a need to understand how to analyse images that deeply impact how we interact in our world, and to understand what influences our own analysis and relationship to the images we are researching.
One cannot help but be somewhat challenged by Rose's treatment in this book of visual methodologies, and in the context where we are increasingly being overwhelmed by a visual culture that allows considerable openness to how we interpret what we see, we must question whether or not we are run the risk of foregoing truth at the expense of accepting how different people interpret the same image differently. In other words, what we see or are perhaps watching on a television report may be somewhat factual, but not necessarily wholly truthful. Furthermore, what we see, is being interpreted through the lens of the reporter and scrutinised even further by our own worldview.
This is not your standard book on research methods, but a thoughtful and helpful review on how to use visual materials successfully for research.
Read
June 28, 2009This book elaborates on various theories and visual methodologies, emphasising the ubiquity of visual materials in today’s culture. (She gives a short, general summary of the “rise” of ocularcentrism in modernism and its evolution into simulacra in postmodern era). Rose systematically analyses a number of theoretical frameworks along with relevant methodologies to describe how, why and when we can use visual technologies as research supporting tools, or even as the foundation of the research itself.
More: http://coffee-cat.net/c2o/2009/06/vis...
More (in Indonesian): http://coffee-cat.net/c2o/id/2009/06/...
More: http://coffee-cat.net/c2o/2009/06/vis...
More (in Indonesian): http://coffee-cat.net/c2o/id/2009/06/...
July 20, 2025
Methodology
Typology of visual study measurements, but not detailed in the procedure itself, good at literature.
Typology of visual study measurements, but not detailed in the procedure itself, good at literature.
October 15, 2011
Rose argues that because we live in such a visually oriented culture, we should become adept at utilizing images to understand the world around us. This is a very "academic" read, but useful for those interested in learning how to interpret culture.
Rose highlights how our own interpretive lens (our experiences in life which shape who we are) influences our presentation of images. For example, two different people viewing the same image on Facebook may have completely different interpretations of what is taking place. I have Facebook friends that live in Boise, ID, and also friends that live in Turkana, Kenya. When I post an image, what do they see? They see the same event, and the same facts, but they interpret that image through completely different contextual lenses.
As cultural researchers, we too must be aware of how our own perspective influences our interpretation of data, and how we report that data.
Rose details not only the theory behind the methods, but also the strengths and weaknesses of each method. For anyone doing serious ethnography, this book is essential reading.
Rose highlights how our own interpretive lens (our experiences in life which shape who we are) influences our presentation of images. For example, two different people viewing the same image on Facebook may have completely different interpretations of what is taking place. I have Facebook friends that live in Boise, ID, and also friends that live in Turkana, Kenya. When I post an image, what do they see? They see the same event, and the same facts, but they interpret that image through completely different contextual lenses.
As cultural researchers, we too must be aware of how our own perspective influences our interpretation of data, and how we report that data.
Rose details not only the theory behind the methods, but also the strengths and weaknesses of each method. For anyone doing serious ethnography, this book is essential reading.
June 3, 2012
This is an excellent primer on interpretation of visual materials. It is an academic text, so if you are expecting anything else, you will be disappointed. It would be a five star book, except there is a few things she omitted in the discussion of a Doisneau photograph in the first chapter and that makes me wonder if she missed other things that may be more important. That's nitpicking, though. This is an excellent intro to the subject.
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September 2, 2011it is a very good book for research methods try it and you will like it.
September 9, 2014
This one is a must have for anyone interested in using visual research methods for a written project of any kind. Very simple navigation and clear instructions. Quite pleasant to read :)
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April 22, 2019Clear and useful
July 14, 2018
The book covers so much of everything, that it is basically just a huge literature review referring to many other sources on visual research methodologies (from imagery as a method to imagery as data and everything in between). Very academic. Very structured, though not an instruction on how to do the research. I didn't find it particularly helpful (or interesting), but it does introduce a very specific terminology, broad bibliography, and some other hints for further research.
I am a postgraduate student with a decade of professional experience in visual communication, and I would say this book strikes a note somewhere between MA and Ph.D.; also might be useful for those researching visuals in their professional practices (scenographers, advertisers, designers, creative directors, artists, etc) and aiming for a greater depth, but again - only as a starting point for further reading.
P.S. if you buy it, buy the 4th edition, as it is updated with additional chapters about the digital era.
I am a postgraduate student with a decade of professional experience in visual communication, and I would say this book strikes a note somewhere between MA and Ph.D.; also might be useful for those researching visuals in their professional practices (scenographers, advertisers, designers, creative directors, artists, etc) and aiming for a greater depth, but again - only as a starting point for further reading.
P.S. if you buy it, buy the 4th edition, as it is updated with additional chapters about the digital era.
October 26, 2022
Farthe, Barx, Maussere, Soucalt-ian survey (haha) of a handful of methodologies for engaging with visual images and ideas. Beyond the chapter on the “Good Eye”, and a basic discussion of perspective and its discontents, it suffers from modernomania—the belief system wherein nobody thought anything meaningful about anything until the modern period. And then she further reduces that reduction to categories of power. However, within that framework it is very well researched and heavily cited.
December 23, 2019
An easy to read introduction to some visual research methologies. Recommended for art and design students.
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February 28, 2023Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials by Gillian Rose (2001)
April 21, 2024
The word "sites" in this book could be switched out with any other word like "composition" or "ingredients" and it would make so much more sense.
September 27, 2025
Great introduction to Visual Culture Studies
March 18, 2016
I found this book very helpful for my research project for my master thesis.
Rose discusses several visual methods though I can not say if the list is exhaustive. This book is definitely at the introductory level and tries to include both theory and practical guides.
>> Chapter 1 - Introduction
>> Chapter 2 - Compositional Interpretation
>> Chapter 3 - Content Analysis
>> Chapter 4 - Semiology
>> Chapter 5 - Psychoanalysis
>> Chapter 6 - Discourse Analysis I
>> Chapter 7 - Discourse Analysis II
>> Chapter 8 - Other Methods
I am using visual methods to analyse architectural sketches and masterplans in the context of spatial planning and policy making. Rose uses paintings, photographs and partly movies as case studies. However, I could still gain enough ideas about how visual analysis is done.
Personally, I found psychoanalysis a bit out of the frame but this might just be because of my different educational background.
I also found that Rose was not as straightforward in discourse analysis than she was in the other chapters, but I could still get a good idea of how discourse analysis works in this field.
Overall, I would recommend this book to everyone who wants to do visual analysis and does not know where or how to start. You can read this book in the middle of your project, just before the analysis and go back to it again and again.
Rose discusses several visual methods though I can not say if the list is exhaustive. This book is definitely at the introductory level and tries to include both theory and practical guides.
>> Chapter 1 - Introduction
>> Chapter 2 - Compositional Interpretation
>> Chapter 3 - Content Analysis
>> Chapter 4 - Semiology
>> Chapter 5 - Psychoanalysis
>> Chapter 6 - Discourse Analysis I
>> Chapter 7 - Discourse Analysis II
>> Chapter 8 - Other Methods
I am using visual methods to analyse architectural sketches and masterplans in the context of spatial planning and policy making. Rose uses paintings, photographs and partly movies as case studies. However, I could still gain enough ideas about how visual analysis is done.
Personally, I found psychoanalysis a bit out of the frame but this might just be because of my different educational background.
I also found that Rose was not as straightforward in discourse analysis than she was in the other chapters, but I could still get a good idea of how discourse analysis works in this field.
Overall, I would recommend this book to everyone who wants to do visual analysis and does not know where or how to start. You can read this book in the middle of your project, just before the analysis and go back to it again and again.
February 26, 2013
An introductory text about visual culture and different methodologies for studying visual materials. Emphasis on introductory. This text was great to read, but it would have been even better reading the summer before I started this art history program. Nonetheless, full of good information and a solid explanation of terms. Also discusses several philosophical approaches in a very systematic and understandable way.
January 29, 2015
Although she does love her Foucault, Rose does a nice job of breaking down ideas about how to look at photos, film (and video) from a variety of levels. Probably an excellent choice for undergraduates who want more challenging/complex thinking.
April 22, 2019
No idea why there are bad reviews. The book is very clear and helpful if you need to use visual methodologies in your research.
May 2, 2019
Dense but interesting. Learned a lot.
May 24, 2021
Helpful to arts based researchers interested in visual methodologies
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February 6, 2018Hyvä rautalankakatsaus erilaisiin visuaalisiin tutkimusmetodeihin ja ohjaa hyvin muiden, tarkempien lukemistojen äärelle.
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