What Authors Call The "photocutionary Act"?

By Author: Mark Gary
Total Articles: 61
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A large portion of this book focuses on what that authors call the "photocutionary act" (p. 41), which is the notion that the act of creating, viewing, or collecting an image is to say something; whether that is to say that the image is a record of reality or that it reminds one of another event or that it is similar to other images in a set, the very existence of the image (or other visual artifact) means that someone, somewhere, tried to say something. These artifacts whether images, sculptures, or movies are constructed to "motivate, articulate, educate, or felicitate" (p. 43) or to remind us of some visual event. Greisdorf and O'Connor write that "we can see without naming what we see; however, we cannot think about Replica Cartier what we see without characterizing that cognitive experience through language" (p. 45). In image collections, they note, more importance is usually given to words than to the images themselves. It is when we begin to assign words to images that we begin to find difficulty.

What facets should be noted? What superordinate and subordinate ...
... relationships are important? Should we describe what we know we see or what we think it means? One roadblock to building image collections is that the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, and other similar systems for describing images are built from a systems-oriented point of view, which tends to limit access for those unfamiliar with how the collection has been built and how it is described. Another roadblock is that visual equivalents of simile, metaphor, allegory, and irony suggest different possible meanings to different viewers, and representing each of these meanings in anticipation of its need is problematic. These problems tend to be caused by using the needs and preferences of the creator and the collector of the images, ignoring viewers as a source for Cartier Replica Watches potential access points. From the viewer, we can usually find a different set of focal points in the images, providing new criteria by which to group and describe those images.

All the different traditional methods of image-collection structure from lists, directories, and indices to taxonomies, typologies, and onto loges can benefit from a mining of the viewer's perspective for new ways and means of describing images from a typically underrepresented perspective. The development of interactive Web-based applications allows viewers to make their voices heard directly, through the practice of tagging images with keywords, and indirectly, through browsing and selecting images in a collection.