AUTHOR: Curtis Lau
POST DATE: 25th August 2015
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: Visual Social Semiotics
LECTURE: Week 4
CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION
ARTIST: Johannes Vermeer
TITLE: “The Girl with the Pearl Earrings”
YEAR OF CREATION: ~1665-1667
COLLECTION/SOURCE: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis/ Frick Collection in New York
TECHNIQUE/MATERIAL: Oil-Based Canvas Painting
DIMENSIONS: 46.5cm x 40cm
IMAGE URL/ ORGIN: http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/10/131029_CBOX_Vermeer-GirlPearlEarring.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg
This narrative based selfie is a painting of a girl. She was also known as “the girl with the pearl earring”.
CONTACT
She is positioned to look straight at us and has developed into a powerful image with her body stance.
DISTANCE
This painting is a close up view for her and viewers will easily be able to have an intimate relationship with the object.
POINT OF VIEW
This is also a frontal angle of her but this time she is slighting angled, which creates a sense of power.
MODALITY
This is low natural modality as it is a painting. However, every single detail of her is captured in this original painting.
SALIENCE
The lighting effects on her face and the highlights in her hair grab the viewer’s attraction. The black and plain background also helps make her stand out and will eventually enhance the users experience. Her clothing is dark and kind of blends into the background, which makes users focus on the details of her head.
COMPARSION BETWEEN BOTH SELFIE/PORTRAIT
Obviously, the style is the major difference between these two images, which changes the modality levels of them. However, portraits can be detailed as like a photograph if time and effort was put into them. The distance level and the amount of people will also change the mood and relationship of an image.
LESSON LEARNT
Although the images are both similar in the way, I feel that different visual social semiotics characteristics will effect how the users will interpretation the image. In addition, the eye contact is very important within a image as we as designers have to learnt to try to avoid users from looking outside the frame, staying inside the frame is a challenge to designers as we want users to capture every single element within the photograph, advertisement and even paintings.
References
- Jewitt, C. & Oyama, R. (2004). Visual Meaning: A Social Semiotic Approach. In T. Van Leeuwen & C.Jewitt, Handbook of Visual Analysis (pp.134-157). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
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