Write a short informal essay on one of the topics.
Essay Topics
1. Read Sturken and Cartwright’s description of the still life by Pieter Claesz carefully. What pictorial conventions are at work in this image to convince you to accept the objects depicted as “real”? In other words, identify the illusionstic devices (or cues that reference our visual experience of the real world) we recognize as signifiers of volume and depth and use to endow shapes on a flat surfaces with those properties. Discuss this process. The authors describe the picture as “a reference to the everyday food of the common people”. Do you think the scene is set in a lower class household? Why or why not? What can an image like this one tell us about society in seventeenth-century Holland?
2. Read Sturken and Cartwright’s account of how ideological considerations informed the portrait of O.J. Simpson chosen for the cover of Time in 1994 (2001, pp. 23-24). Find (and reproduce) a photograph that you believe does similar representational work and perform your own analysis.
