Portfolio Task Five - How To Read A Photograph

You would have thought that when you read text you see it as text and when you see a photograph, you read it as a photograph but Clarke, G insists that you actually need to read a photograph as a piece of text instead of just seeing it as the image that it is. That reading involves a series of problematic, ambiguous, and often contradictory meanings and relationships between the reader and the image. The meaning of a photograph is achieved through what is called ‘photographic discourse’ which is made up of its own grammar and syntax as a language. The first step of reading an image is to scan over it so you can take in as much information as you possibly can so that you can get some sort of idea of what it is about. You then have to engage yourself with the image which means having to dive deeper in to it before giving some critical analysis of the image. By doing this it is as if you’re putting yourself in the photographer’s shoes to get a better understanding of what they were trying to achieve, “To read a photograph, then, is to enter into a series of relationships which are hidden.”

I have decided to look at this photograph, it has been taken by the photographer David La Chapelle who is a photographer and director who works in the fields of fashion, advertising and fine art photography, and is noted for his surreal, unique, sexualized, and often humorous style. The image is of the artist ‘Lil Kim’, at first glance what you mainly notice is the eye catching Louis Vuitton pattern that has been plastered on to her body making her in to a living luxury item. The colours used has made her blend in with the scenery which makes you automatically look deeper into the photograph to get a better understanding of what is going on. It’s as if Chapelle is trying to out do Louis Vuitton’s imagery by going a step further in what Vuitton could do with their image, he’s making ‘Lil Kim’ just as desirable to an on lookers eye as an actual Louis Vuitton product is.