Representation, subjectivity and spectatorship

Abstract

The argument about the cultural significance of the “new man” imagery that this book sets out is carried through an analysis of visual representations — pre-eminently fashion photography. How I approach textual analysis, then, has been a prominent methodological and conceptual concern. The work of Michel Foucault has been consistently illuminating in this regard. In turning to Foucault, I have wanted explicitly to signal my distance from a model of textual analysis that dominates a good deal of the work on visual representations within cultural studies and the newer forms of media studies. Namely, the semiotic approach to textual analysis. This work foregrounds attention to the construction of meaning through the rules of signification internal to the representations that are at the centre of its analysis. Positively, this emphasis gives due regard to the efficacy of the moment of representation in producing a determinate set of meanings. It usefully insists that these cannot be read-off from either the conditions of the image’s production or its consumption. In concrete studies, this close reading is then usually supplemented by a move from the representation itself to a set of contextual factors — most frequently in the shape of a set of assertions about the moment of the representation’s consumption. In Barthes’s famous reading of the Paris Match cover, for example, it was the specific conjunctural context of the Algerian War that Barthes called up to pin down his reading of the connotations of the image (Barthes 1972).