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The study of images alone, as objects whose meaning is intrinsic to them, is a mistaken method if you are interested in the ways in which people assign meaning to pictures. (Ruby 1995a: 5)

The idea of ‘reading’ a photograph or other visual image merely extends the range of a term normally applied to the written word and is used commonly by commentators on a whole variety of visual forms, from paintings to television soap operas. There are, however, some important differences which are not always made explicit, or which are perhaps not even recognized by some who use the term. First, although we use the term fairly casually throughout this book, we do not wish to suggest that there is a ‘language’ of images or image components that follows some kind of quasi-grammatical rules, either universally or in more socially specific contexts. Within any particular sociocultural environment, we may learn to associate certain visual images with certain meanings, but these are normally highly context dependent and often transient. In popular Indian cinema of the 1980s a sharp camera zoom in onto the face of a character (together with a musical climax) was commonly read as an indication of intense emotion on the part of the character, perhaps associated with the revelation of a hidden fact. On British television by contrast, the same camera movement would be read today as a melodramatic cliché, perhaps prompting associations with amateurish 1960s or 1970s soap opera. Sequences of images, however, or individual pictorial elements, have no inherent para-syntactic or structural association, other than that which an interpretative community – the audience – is educated to expect by convention.

Secondly, ‘reading’ to some extent implies that the ‘message’ being read lies within the visual image, that it is speaking to us and that all we need to do is listen. On the contrary, it is human beings who speak to one another, literally and metaphorically through their social relations. But, as anthropologists and others are well aware, human beings frequently displace those conversations onto inanimate objects, giving them the semblance of life or agency (Kopytoff 1986). When we read a photograph, a film or an art-work, we are tuning in to conversations between people, including but not limited to the creator of the visual image and his or her audience. Those other participants include gallery curators, television producers, aid agencies, and a whole variety of other persons who present images to a viewing/reading public.

In The Photography Handbook Terence Wright describes three approaches to reading photographs: looking through, looking at and looking behind. These approaches he associates with realist, formalist and expressive strategies of authorial intention (Wright 1999: 38 ff.). The labels in themselves do not matter here; what Wright is saying about photographs, which would hold true for any visual representation, is that a reader can consider both their content and their context. For some photographs, or in the eyes of some readers, the content is primarily a matter of information, as though one were looking through a window at some object beyond: this is my partner, this is the house where I stayed on fieldwork. In the eyes of others the way that content is presented is deemed important – the arrangement of elements, the angle of light, and so on: this tiny baby in the crook of that heavily muscled arm, lit to produce deep shadows ‘says’ something about strength and fragility, experience and innocence. With other images, or in the eyes of still other readers, it is the context within which the image was produced that assumes prominence: this image of a naked Aboriginal woman, standing in profile against a measuring rule, was taken in accordance with a now-discredited nineteenth century theory of human biological variation.

The properties of the images, and the interpretation of readers, are not fixed. The nineteenth century anthropometric photograph (reproduced in Spencer 1992: 101) was intended to be read for its informational content, but would now be read as an insight into the social, intellectual and perhaps even sexual background and interests of its unknown photographer and those like him. In what follows we focus in particular on the first and third of Wright’s approaches – looking through and looking behind – but we employ a slightly different terminology, one that stresses the element of readership or audience, and one that is concerned with the social rather than the individual construction of meaning.⁴ The content of an image we refer to as its internal narrative – the story, if you will, that the image communicates (see Barthes 1981: 40). This is not necessarily the same as the narrative the image-maker wished to communicate, indeed it can often be markedly different. This is linked to, but analytically separable from, what we call the external narrative. By this we mean the social context that produced the image, and the social relations within which the image is embedded at any moment of viewing.

Although these terms may be used in opposition, in practice they are of course intertwined, and elements of external narrative – information about the nature of the world beyond the photograph – are always involved in readings of the internal narrative. Shown a photograph of a woman in a white dress and veil, a man standing beside her in a morning coat, we might reasonably assume that it is a wedding photograph, though we cannot know that the woman is the photographer’s sister unless we know her too or were told. If we are shown the same photograph in the pages of a magazine, with certain textual elements attached, then we are more likely to assume the two are actors, dressed up for an advertising shoot to sell wedding attire. Either way, we draw upon internal and external narratives in our reading: in the one case to tell ourselves a story of romantic love within a familial context; in the other to tell ourselves a story about consumption and the commodification of romantic love within a possibly global context. What is apparently the ‘same image’ can be a presentation of self (this is how I want to be seen, such as a photograph posted on Facebook) or a commercial action designed to influence others (an advert). We note too that these distinctions can be applied not only to photographs and films but also to clothing and accessories worn by humans and their online avatars (see Section 1.4.1 below).

As scholars of the visual we want to encourage researchers to take visual evidence seriously. The general approach can be applied to the study of fashion and adornment or body art, to advertising images and to the images an individual posts online of parties and the food they eat. It also applies to the images that a researcher may produce in the course of undertaking a research project.