Visual Culture Essay

If you have any interest at all, please read it and critique. I need all the help I can get on this.



Imagery in Our Lives: Essay 1

The alarm clock went off noisily, and I quickly grabbed it and turned off the sound. For a few minutes I lay in bed staring at my roommates bed above me, the lines of the wood fascinating me. There was one in particular that looked like a face from the right angle. With a quiet sigh of regret I threw the covers off and went to take a shower. I was making an effort to pay attention to the images around me for a class assignment, and so I looked at the shampoo bottle and face-wash as I went through my morning routine.

Even while trying to focus on images around me I managed to only barely register the posters and pictures I had pinned to every wall around me, pictures of my friends and family that brought back fond memories. Not to mention the advertisements I encountered when I checked my email or browsed any of the other websites I frequented. I always saw them out of the corner of my eye, but tended to ignore them unless they were flashy or had some sort of key word that caught my eye. This sort of key word would change from day to day based on what my thoughts were focused on, something like Japanese, or swimming, or some fantasy oriented word. These are images that I see on a daily basis and just never thought about or reacted to before.

I rarely thought about why certain advertisements caught my interest, or why I chose the posters I did, or the pictures. There was a certain life and vitality in them due to either the subject, or the color. Sometimes it was just a matter of concept. I have one poster in my room that is bright pink with a black figure dancing with type all over with dance idioms and quotes. I bought it because I love dance, I also loved how simple it was while capturing so many of the reasons that I love to dance. Another one is a black and white photograph with a couple kissing in the center holding a red umbrella. It’s a simple picture expressing love; the colors are basic with that one exception to draw the eye. The red color draws the eye and represents love and adds to the kiss to signify love. One thing that all these pictures and posters have in common is their bright colors. Even the black and white poster has a high contrast with it’s colors to make it stand out.

One other place that I encountered images was in my textbooks. It was something I hadn’t really thought about before, the use of images for teaching. Every textbook I have has some sort of image in it, even if it’s just a simple icon at the beginning of the chapter like in my Fiction book. These pictures are focused on providing examples and helping us to learn the material of the book. I can’t imagine going through life without these images.

Which leads me to thinking about life in general without images. I think about trying to remember people and places without pictures. Perhaps I would write about every little detail, but it could never do the truth justice. I would forget little details and I would lose the ability to glance at the wall in front of my and smile in response to all the faces smiling back at me. There’s so much that we wouldn’t have in life. We wouldn’t have television or comics or art in general. There would be no advertisements. Even computers may have never been invented because we wouldn’t have come up with the concept of the screen without the television. Not to mention how they would express all the programs without icons.

Even the letters are an image created to represent sounds. It’s taken hundreds of thousands of years to get to the alphabet we know now, and each letter came from some historical drawing or design that represented something and then was simplified to create these letters. If we hadn’t started drawing on cave walls, we wouldn’t even have thought of using it to tell stories.

I keep thinking about how I would express something only with words, if you were to eliminate letters from imagery. So often I sketch something out rather than writing about it. Even just when talking I tend to describe something with gestures or some sort of basic description if I can’t think of a certain word, and it’s those images that trigger other peoples memories so they know what I’m talking about. When you consider all this, I don’t know how we would even have a history or culture or anything even closely resembling modern life.

Personally I don’t think I can go even five seconds without seeing an image. Even if I was in a completely empty room, I look at what I’m wearing and there are images. My watch has the iron man logo on it, my ring has little waves circling it, my sweatshirt has a red cross for ski patrol on it, and my sweats have paw prints. I think part of this is that I’ve been so trained to see images everywhere around me. Such as the very first image I mentioned that was in the lines of the wood above my bed that looked like a face.

Images have such a significant role in our lives today. They really are everywhere, even if they are images that our imaginations create simply because we’ve been raised that way. Images started with basic representations, they gave us our written language and history so that we could grow and create the environment we live in now. Our culture and society revolves around images; the bright flashy advertisements we see, the newspapers we read, books, pictures, posters, television, all of it. Images are how we express ourselves, and how we communicate. Images drive us to create our world and ourselves. We wouldn’t have what we have today without images.