Picturing African‐Americans: Readers reading magazine advertisements

Abstract

In recent years, advertisements depicting stereotypes of African‐Americans have given way to advertising images that show African‐Americans as middle‐ and upper class consumers. This articles uses photo‐elicitation to study the meaning readers attach to advertising images of African‐American success. The results provide insight into how advertisements pull readers into a web of ideological meanings. The results also show how other social structures and their discursive frameworks, e.g., religion, education, political ideology, media and social class mitigate, inflect, deflect and reinforce readers’ readings of advertisements.