Lighting: How it can change the meaning to a picture

With today’s technology, magazines and films and newspapers can just do about anything with light and lighting to make a picture look different or convey a different meaning. According to Richard Dryer, there is a lot of work that needs to be done culturally in the way the media constructs imagines of the world. The historical media is concerned with how the ideology of seeing the world serves particular social interests implicating the mode of representation.

Celebrities are constantly being photographed when they are at work, out running errands, or a night out with some friends. These pictures sometime filter out into the public and the meaning of these images can change dramatically when the images social perspectives change and they then acquire a new meaning.

As most of you know O.J. Simpson was arrested as a suspect to the murder of his wife in 1994. Simpson’s police mug shot was published on the cover of Newsweek and Times magazine. The Newsweek cover is the original mugshot, whereas the Time cover is digitally manipulated. Now if we compare the covers of the two magazines, it is obvious that Times “heightened the contrast and darkened Simpson’s skin tone in its use to connote evil and to imply guilt.” It is clear that on the cover of Time, O.J. Simpson looks more evil than he does on the cover of newsweek. This goes to show that best intentions are often not good enough and that ethical principles should be applied when decisions are made.

I strongly believe that news photographs should either be authentic or not be published at all. All of these manipulations distort the truth a photo. And as a prime example, Time magazine made Simpson look like criminal.

In the culture we live in, darker skin tones are an association with evil and the stereotype of African American men are seen as criminals. As we can tell the tonal depiction of O.J.’s mug shot, the neutral elements of the picture (tone and color) can take on socio-historical meanings.

There are many tools we use to create images and to interpret the meaning of an image. When we interpret an image, we just look at it automatically, without giving much thought. However, most of us can interpret an image through formal clues or elements such as tone, light, color, contrast, and the perspective of which the viewer makes out of the image.

Now let’s take a look at Paris Hilton or even Khloe Kardashian’s mug shot. These two photos were on the cover of almost every celebrity gossip magazine. The lighting of these mug shots were brightened and did not convey Hilton nor Kardashian as criminals but as innocent Hollywood celebrities that had done nothing wrong.

According to Dyer, such lighting and imagery “is also inflicted by class and gender… it’s so crucial to the sexual reproductive economy of race.” White women glow when photographed and this constructs the ideal image of a white woman within heterosexuality. White women are looked at by the Victoria values. These symbols made “whites special as a race was their non-physical, spiritual, and ethereal qualities,” Dyer said. The images of white women were held up to the standards of what they could be, should be, and essentially were. And as an example Hilton and Kardashian do not look like criminals in their mug shot but a mere image of angels.

To my understand photographs are altered with the intent of changing a persons character or the past and I strongly believe that news photographs should either be authentic or not be published at all. All of these manipulations distort the truth a photo!

-Christine