Exercise
Choose a day that you can spend out and about looking with no particular agenda. Be conscious of how images and texts are presented to you in the real world – on billboards, in magazines and newspapers, and online, for example. Make notes in your learning log on some specific examples and reflect upon what impact the text has on how you read the overall message.
Results
This exercise falls at a time when I am in social isolation for COVID-19 and so cannot leave the house. Not ideal for the exercise and so I decided to pick up some random magazines from our collection and choose some random advertisements from within them. I have described two that had a big impact on me here.
Majestic Trees
Fig 1 shows an advert for Majestic Trees, a retailer of trees.
The image itself shows an old tree set in some open gardens with what looks like a large Manor House behind it. The primary text states “It’s not just a tree. It’s a legacy”.
I feel that the image evokes feelings of countryside, traditional gardens, feelings of summer (although the tree is not in leaf). It could be a shot taken in many many large country house grounds. It is not overtly about the tree.
The text is split into two sentences. The first “It’s not just a tree” is in smaller font to the second but, because it comes first, it is what I read first. The text for me is anchorage, it makes me realise that this is an advert about trees. The tree in the image does not appear to be the subject of it, one might expect it to be the house, but with this text, I am now thinking mostly about the tree and not about the house, it has controlled me.
The second sentence “It’s a legacy” is, I think, relay text. The overall image is one of tradition but it is not an interpretation that I think I would get to without the text. So the text is not making me zero in, it is making me think about the image differently. Now that I have done that, I return to the tree in the image. To tree in the image is, I think, an oak tree and it was that is probably a hundred years old. These are trees that often symbolise Britishness and grounding.
The advert is in the magazine called “The English Garden”. I don’t know, but I would guess that the average reader is 40+. Nearly every forty year old or more starts to care about their legacy. So suddenly, advert which is actually about selling trees has become all about leaving a legacy, the image takes on a totally different meaning. The starts to imagine the legacy that they could leave and forgets that they probably don’t have a garden or house anything like the size of that shown in the image.
The way that I have described the feelings above is how they affect me. I have actually been thinking about planting a tree, but it was for ornamental purposes, perhaps a magnolia or a cherry tree. This advert has successfully manipulated my thoughts onto something totally different in a surprising way because the manipulation itself has got nothing to do with trees at all!
Ashbridge Partners
This advert is taken from Cotswold Life and is an advert for a company that deals with bridging loans, see Fig. 2
The main image in the advert shows a very idyllic large county house that sets onto what appears to be a river. The text states “Don’t lose the home of your dreams”.
From the image itself, we cannot tell what the purpose of it is. It could be a property advert for that specific house, to it could just be a shot from within a Cotswold village; both of these scenarios are visible in many images in the magazine.
The text implies that if you don’t do something, and we don’t know what that is yet, then we could lose the home of our dreams. Specifically, we don’t know if this refers to a future house, or the house that we are trying to buy, or even the house that we live in already, which could conceivably be the home of our dreams. So this advert potentially applies to every viewer.
I think this is clever, we are forced to read the rest of the advert to see that it is about. Even then, the rest of text does not make it overtly clear, one cannot simply glance at the rest of the page to find out, one has to study it in detail. By the end, I have discovered that the advert is for bridging loans, I don’t need one of those but if I ever do, I will likely remember that I read about them in this advert, whereas I may not have if the advert had overtly been about the loan as I would have simply passed over it.
The text in the image has made me read the advert, more than the image itself. It gave the image a different meaning and so I think that this text is relay text.
Learning
When Barthes discussed anchoridge versus relay text, his conclusion was that text was most likely used to control the viewer and how they look at (or ignore) specific parts of an image.
In the two examples above, the text that has had the biggest impact upon me is relay text. These are the two adverts that I chose after looking through around 20 magazines and so to me that suggests that relay text can have a very big impact on the viewer.
I think in both cases, the text has effectively made me think about the images in a different context, they are not just nice landscape scenes, they are symbols of things that might be valuable to me in my life. It is what that symbol represents, and is evoked by the test, that has more impact upon me than any direct, non interpreted elements within the images themselves.
For me this is a useful technique that I could use to help encourage users to think about my images in different ways than the literal image put before them. It’s a bit like the provocative question that nearly all TED talks start with when they question a fact that the listens thought was unquestionable.