Practices of Looking.

Chapter 1 - Images, Power and Politics.

"Ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all culture. Images are an important means through which ideologies are produced and onto which ideologies are projected." - page 23 

"Just as Simpson's mug shot took on new meanings when taken out of police records and reproduced on the cover of popular magazines, so an image appearing as a work of art in a museum takes on quite a different meaning when it is reproduced in advertisement... Thus image codes change meaning in different contexts." - page 27

"Language, according to Saussure, is like a game of chess. It depends on conventions and codes for it's meanings. At the same time, Saussure argued, the relationship between a word (or the sound of that when spoken) and things in the world is arbitrary and relative, not fixed. For example, the word dog in English, chein 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 the conventions of language rather than some natural connection. It was central to Saussure's theory that meanings change according to context and to the rules of language." - page 28

"Peirce believed that language and thought are processes of sign interpretation. For Peirce, meaning resides not in the initial perception of a sign or representation of an object but in the interpretation of the perception and subsequent action based on that perception. Every thought is a sign without meaning until a subsequent thought (what he called an interpretant) allows for it's interpretation. For example, we perceive an octagonal red sign with the letters STOP inscribed. The meaning lies in the interpretation of the sign and the subsequent action (we stop)." - page 28

"In Barthes's model, in addition to the two levels of meanings of denotation and connotation, there is the sign, which is composed of the signifer - a sounds, 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 signifer and happiness is the signified... The image (or word) and it's meaning together (the signifier and the signified together) form the sign." - page 29