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Journal of Geography in Higher

Education
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Teaching visualised geographies:

towards a methodology for the
interpretation of visual materials
a
Gillian Rose
a
Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh,
Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, Scotland, UK
Published online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Gillian Rose (1996) Teaching visualised geographies: towards a
methodology for the interpretation of visual materials, Journal of Geography in Higher
Education, 20:3, 281-294, DOI: 10.1080/03098269608709373

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 Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 20, No. 3, 1996

Teaching Visualised Geographies: towards a

methodology for the interpretation of visual
materials
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GILLIAN ROSE, University of Edinburgh, UK

ABSTRACT This paper suggests a number of questions which can be used to structure
a small-group discussion about the interpretation of visual images. As many geogra-
phers now are demonstrating, geographical knowledges are very often visualised.
However, there is currently little on offer methodologically to help students approach the
interpretation of visual images critically. This paper hopes to start to remedy this
situation. It begins by sketching a theoretical understanding of the meanings of visual
images. It then suggests a number of questions that flow from that understanding, which
can be addressed to a particular visual image in order to facilitate a discussion about
its possible meanings.

KEYWORDS Visual images, interpretation, methodology, small-group discussion,

geographical knowledge.

Introduction: the geographical and the visual

In recent years, a number of human geographers have become increasingly interested in
the importance of the visual to the construction of many kinds of geographical
knowledges: knowing the world, it seems, is also very often about seeing the world. The
most elaborated example of how a particular kind of geographical knowledge entails a
specific kind of visualisation of the world is probably the body of work critically
exploring the notion of landscape, which has focused on the western, bourgeois,
masculinist tradition of landscape painting and its use of perspective in the making of
this particular 'way of seeing' (Cosgrove, 1985; Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988; Daniels,
1993; Nash, 1993). Geographers have also focused on other modes of visualising
landscapes, places and spaces, however: movies (Aitken & Zonn, 1994), television
(Burgess, 1987; Burgess & Wood, 1988; Rose, 1994), photo-magazines (Lutz & Collins,
1993), computer games (Driver, 1995), promotional publicity materials (Burgess, 1982;
Cosgrove 1994; Kearns & Philo, 1993), art photography (Withers, 1994)—to cite just a
few examples. And yet more geographers are beginning to look at how academic

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 G. Rose

geography also depends on visual imagery to articulate its views of the world, in
photographs, maps, diagrams, graphs and tables (Driver, 1995; Harley, 1992; Ryan,
1994; Woods, 1993). It thus appears that many kinds of geographical knowledges have
been and continue to be produced through a wide range of visual media.
It follows from the importance of the visual to the geographical that geography
students should be able to interpret visual materials critically, in the same way that they
learn to assess other kinds of evidence. Yet, surprisingly given its preference for
empirically grounded accounts of particular visualised geographies, the literature cited
above contains very few discussions of the methodologies used on which students might
draw. In fact, as far as I am aware, there are only four discussions of methodology. The
first of these is what might be called iconographical analysis and is described by Daniels
and Cosgrove (1988); the second is Relph's (1989) phenomenological approach; the
third is the analogy pursued by Duncan (1990) of landscape as text (see also Barnes &
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Duncan, 1992; Duncan & Duncan, 1988); and the fourth is the semiotic analysis offered
by Burgess & Wood (1988; see also Hopkins, 1994). Students I teach have been critical
of the first three of these. They comment adversely on the absence of self-reflexivity in
them, and also feel that they are too far removed from everyday practices of image
circulation and interpretation. The first says little about diverse audiences and interpreta-
tions, while the other two, which do, are criticised for using an excessively obscure
theoretical language (for other critiques of 'landscape as text', see Burgess, 1990; Rose,
1993). I have therefore chosen not to elaborate either of those approaches here. The
remaining discussion, by Burgess & Wood (1988), I have found much more useful, but
it is extremely brief.
The relatively small number of methodological discussions concerns me because the
students who participate in a course I teach on visual images of landscape are, initially,
very hesitant about discussing visual material. Students often ask me if they need to have
taken an art history course in order to be able to do mine; the answer is no, but the
question suggests that dealing with visual sources is perceived as beyond the remit of the
discipline of geography (and this perception is not always countered by what students
often describe as the rather pretentious flourishes of scholarliness to be found in some
work on landscape images by cultural geographers). Students clearly need some kind of
encouragement in order to begin thinking about visual images, and I think that an
explicit discussion about methodology is a very useful resource for them to have in this
context. This paper aims to provide just such a resource for those facing similar teaching
difficulties.
My course is called "The Cultural Politics of Landscape', and it is taught to advanced,
third- and fourth-year, undergraduates. These students have all attended the geography
department's core third-year course on the philosophy and methodology of geography,
and from this should have a basic grasp of the founding premiss of my course, which
is that geographical knowledges are discursively produced. The aims of the course are:
• to describe aspects of ways in which images of places are refracted through power
relations;
• to present a range of critical theoretical debates about power, representation and
identity;
• to explore different strategies of resistance to dominant representations of land-
scape;
• to interpret visual images critically.

The course focuses on landscapes represented in painting, photography, film and video.

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It runs over nine weeks and consists of nine two-hour lecture/discussion sessions and
five one-hour small-group discussions. I use the first small-group session to develop a
methodology for approaching visual images. I do this in the small-group format because
the groups are small enough to encourage everyone to participate in what, at moments,
can be a quite uncertain discussion. Clearly, in the space of one hour only a limited
number of interpretive issues can be raised; so the intention of the hour is not to
undertake a methodological project but rather to get students thinking about what sorts
of questions are useful to ask about an image. In a sense, the rest of the course goes on
to provide detailed suggestions, contexts and answers to the sorts of questions the first
discussion raises, as it addresses specific landscape images.
This is an approach that students themselves evaluate positively. The small-group
discussions are often cited as one of the most useful parts of the course, where students
feel they can explore methodological and theoretical issues in a constructive manner.
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Student reaction also indicates that the course objective of giving them the skills to
analyse visual images critically is achieved.
The next section amplifies the theoretical assumptions of the course which structure
the methodology I offer students. The remaining sections suggest a number of questions
which can be used to inform a small-group discussion, with the aim of helping students
develop through that discussion a practical set of tools for interpreting visual images.

Some Methodological Starting Points

The particular methodological strategy I suggest here depends on a certain theoretical
framework. Those social sciences which have at some point in their history made
extensive use of visual images in the construction of their knowledges—geography, but
also sociology (Stasz, 1979) and anthropology (Edwards, 1992)—initially used such
images in the belief that they could provide particularly accurate and full descriptions of
people, places and events. The methodological concerns which flow from this belief,
which is still held by some, revolve around questions of accuracy, error, bias and
representativeness (see for example, Templin, 1982; Wagner, 1979). However, such
confidence in the image as a reflection of social truth has been assailed more recently
in a number of ways, all of which problematise the claim to represent 'truth' by
exploring the unequal social relations produced, reproduced and resisted in the creation
and reception of any image (Harper, 1994; Taylor, 1994). A similarly critical approach
to images is taken by geographers now studying the visualisation of geographical
knowledges (see for example Aitken, 1994; Burgess, 1990). Visual representations of
places, spaces and landscapes are never taken as straightforward mirrors of reality by
these geographers. Instead, the meanings of an image are understood as constructed
through a range of complex and thoroughly social processes and sites of signification.
This is a process imbued with power relations. As Hopkins (1994, p. 58) notes,
"signification is necessarily ideological because the process of making meanings intrin-
sically excludes other meanings, and the social conventions that enable the sharing of
meanings are themselves ideologically framed". This theoretical orientation produces a
different set of methodological questions. Instead of asking how accurately an image
replicates the real world, it asks instead how an image functions to produce a particular
representation of the world; instead of assessing the representativeness of an image it
inquires into its significance; instead of worrying about bias it tries to elucidate the ways
in which particular social power relations structure the meanings of an image. It is this
theoretical stance which shapes the methodological tactics I suggest here.

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 G. Rose

The theoretical literatures which critically explore the 'thoroughly social processes and
sites of signification' are diverse. But all insist that these processes and sites are
extremely complex, at once material and cultural, forming a network of producers,
transmitters, technologies, audiences, exhibitors, media, curators, sites, consumers and
critics—to name just some of the actants in this network—all of which make sense of
any particular image through complicated, multiple and possibly contradictory codes of
signification. As Pollock (1988, p. 30) argues, analysis of images must take the 'precise
and heterogeneous configurations' of this complexity into account. But how?
Because I am interested in this complexity of meaning, I am not persuaded by the
various versions of contents analysis which have been used to interpret visual images
(Ball & Smith, 1992, pp. 20-31; cf. Lutz & Collins, 1993). Rather, the way I choose to
move from this broad theoretical conceptualisation of meaning production towards a
useful methodology for the interpretation of particular images is by focusing on what
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several geographers argue are the most important nodes within this network of actants
(Aitken, 1994; Burgess, 1990; see also Lutz & Collins, 1993; Michaels, 1991; Musello,
1979). There are three, and they are highly interconnected—producers, texts and
audiences:
• by producers, I mean the people and equipment involved in making the image,
whether that be a Hollywood movie director, scriptwriter, crew and cameras, or a
family and its camcorder making a holiday video;
• by text, I mean the image itself;
• by audiences, I mean all those who look at the image, which might involve some,
all or none of the following, among many other possibilities: a pedestrian casually
glancing at it in a street, a paying visitor concentrating on it in an art gallery, a
professional researcher accessing it from a computer database, a family member
retrieving it from a box in the attic.
The analytical task is to understand how meaning is produced at each of these nodes.
And I suggest that the production of meanings in each node may be considered in three,
again, highly interconnected, registers: the social, the aesthetic and the technological:
• by the social, I mean the organisation of social institutions, social difference and
social subjectivities;
• by the aesthetic, I mean visual codes and conventions;
• by the technological, I mean the equipment involved in the image. I have chosen
to describe equipment as an actant too in this account, following a number of recent
commentators concerned not to reduce the technological to the sociocultural
(Haraway, 1991; Latour, 1993; Penley & Ross, 1991).
I am not providing a diagram which links nodes and registers together and which
inevitably creates false distinctions and oversimplified relations (cf. Burgess, 1990;
Michaels, 1991). Instead, the intermeshing of nodes and registers provides the basis for
a number of questions, listed in the next sections of this paper (see also Table I).
These are the sort of questions I ask in the first small-group discussion of my course,
and I ask them in relation to a specific image: a photo by Robert Doisneau, variously
titled "Sidelong Glance", "An Oblique Look" and "Painting by Wagner in the Galerie
Ronu, Rue de Seine, Paris 6e, 1948". I give a photocopy of it to the students, as it
appears on page 86 of Pollock (1988), including the surrounding text by Pollock. This
image is useful because, although most students know little about its production, it is a
very striking image which permits careful discussion of the text as a site of meanings,

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TABLE I. A list of questions (technological, aesthetic, social).

Some questions about production:

• When was it made?
• Where was it made?
• Who made it?
• Was it made for someone else?
• What technologies does its production depend on?
• What were the social identities of the maker, the owner and the subject of the text?
• What were the relations between the maker, the owner and the subject?
• Does the form of the image address these identities and relations of its production?
Some questions about the text:
• What is being shown? What are the components of the image? How are they arranged?
• Is it one of a series?
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• What is the vantage point of the image?

• What use is made of colour?
• How has its technology affected the text?
• What is, or are, the genre(s) of the image? Is it documentary, soap opera, or melodrama, for example?
• What are the characteristics of its genre?
• To what extent does this image draw on those characteristics?
• What do the different components of an image signify?
• Whose referent systems are being deployed to represent a geography?
• Whose referent systems are excluded from this representation?
• What relationships are established between the components of the image visually?
• Where is the viewer's eye drawn to in the image, and why?
• Does this image's particular look at its subject disempower its subject?
• Does this image comment critically on the characteristics of its genre?
• Are the relations between the components of this image unstable?
• Is this a contradictory image?
Some questions about audiences:
• Who were the original audience(s) for this image?
• Where and how would the text have been displayed originally?
• How is it circulated?
• How is it stored?
• How is it re-displayed?
• Who are the more recent audiences for this text?
• Where is the spectator positioned in relation to the components of the image?
• What relation does this produce between the image and its viewers?
• Is the image one of a series, and how do the preceding and subsequent images affect its meanings?
• Would the image have had a written text to guide its interpretation in its initial moment of display,
for example a caption or a catalogue entry?
• Is the image represented elsewhere in a way which invites a particular relation to it, in publicity
materials for example, or in reviews?
• Have the technologies of circulation and display affected the audiences' interpretation of this image?
• What are the conventions for viewing this technology?
• Is more than one interpretation of the image possible?
• How actively does a particular audience engage with the image?
• Is there any evidence that a particular audience produced a meaning for an image that differed from
the meanings produced at the production or text nodes?
• How do different audiences interpret this image?
• How are these audiences different from each other, in terms of class, gender, 'race', sexuality and
so on?
• How do these axes of social identity structure different interpretations?

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 G. Rose

and it is also an image with obvious multiple audiences: Pollock and the students
themselves, quite apart from other possible audiences in galleries and of its reproduc-
tions. I start the discussion with a series of fairly straightforward 'who? what? how?
when? questions. I then try to get students to reconsider their responses to those initial
questions by focusing on the power relations embedded in the various sites and processes
of meaning-making associated with the image, and I do this by asking them a series of
questions about "the social organisation of meaning involved in this signifying activity"
(Michael, 1991, p. 305). I try to move the discussion from questions about the maker of
the image as an individual, for example, towards an exploration of her or his social
identity; or from what the single image shows towards the conventions of its genre. In
this first discussion, I have found that this shift is most easily achieved in the context of
considering the audiences of the image. Students themselves usually have quite strong
opinions about the man photographed by Doisneau, who is sneaking a look at a painting
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of a female nude while his wife, looking elsewhere and oblivious, carries on talking to
him. He is usually labelled either as a 'lech' or as 'hen-pecked', and this allows us to
begin talking about gender and the difference it may make to the meaning an audience
will give to the image. Pollock's feminist interpretation of the image provides a further
development of the discussion (and students often disagree with her analysis of the
photo). Students also differ about whether Doisneau's other work (especially a photo
called 'The Kiss', with which most are familiar from its reproduction as a greeting card)
is slushy nonsense or tender romance, and this debate can lead to a discussion about the
social specificities of 'taste'. I conclude the seminar by summarising our discussion in
terms of the intersection of nodes and registers outlined above.
What follows, then, are some possible questions which might structure a small-group
discussion aimed at introducing students to a methodology for the interpretation of visual
materials. They are divided into clusters of questions which centre on one node or
another; the responses will refer to different registers, and will quickly merge with other
nodes. The questions are many and diverse, and I am not suggesting that they be used
as some sort of checklist and steadily worked through during an hour. Their use should
be selective and will depend on the focus of the particular course in which they are being
used, the knowledge of the students participating, and the directions the discussion takes.
Their use should be focused towards the conclusion of the discussion, however, so that
students can see the importance of the different nodes and registers as foci for the
interpretive task.

Some Questions about Production

Some of the most obvious questions to ask about an image concern the circumstances
of its production:
• When was it made?
• Where was it made?
• Who made it?
• Was it made for someone else?
• What technologies does its production depend on?
The Doisneau photograph, for example, depends on the development in the late 1920s
of light, portable cameras and high-speed film.
These questions say little about the meaning of its production for its producers,
however, so a further series of questions is necessary. These address the social identities

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 Teaching Visualised Geographies

and relations within which the image was produced and in terms of which its production
became significant. Here, students should consider (at least) the social identities and
relations of class, gender, 'race' and sexuality:
• What were the social identities of the maker, the owner and the subject of the text?
• What were the relations between the maker, the owner and the subject?
This is often a difficult move to make in discussions of certain types of images, since
I have found that the idea of the artist as a uniquely gifted, autonomous individual is very
strongly established among students. A wonderful antidote to that particular myth is
Pollock's (1992) account of Gauguin's stay in Tahiti. Without losing a sense of Gauguin
as an individual, Pollock explores his gendered, classed, sexualised and racialised subject
position by exploring his fantasies about Tahiti. She then connects these European
fantasies about its colonised others to the dynamics of the European art market in order
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to understand why Gauguin painted Tahiti in the way he did. Doisneau made his living
as a commercial photographer, selling his photographs to the editors of magazines and
books, and in discussion we debate what difference that might have made to his images
of Parisian streets.
Finally, students can consider the aesthetic register and ask themselves:

• Does the form of the image address these identities and relations of its production?
In the Doisneau image, for example, the voyeurism of the photographer hidden from and
in some way superior to his subjects could be seen as typical of the middle-class gaze
at its social others through which documentary photography has been constituted as a
genre. This final question merges directly with another node, that of the text.

Some Questions about the Text

Here are some possible questions, meant to get students looking carefully at the image:
• What is being shown? What are the components of the image? How are they
arranged?
• Is it one of a series?
• What is the vantage point of the image?
• What use is made of colour?
• How has its technology affected the text?
Again, though, the discussion must broaden into a debate about the meanings of the
image. This might begin by considering the aesthetic context in which the image is
significant, that is, its genre:
• What is, or are, the genre(s) of the image? Is it documentary, soap opera, or
melodrama, for example?
• What are the characteristics of its genre?
• To what extent does this image draw on those characteristics?
Discussing the genre of an image is another useful way of moving beyond many
students' conviction that an image is the result of one autonomous individual's vision.
By demonstrating that the image we are discussing shares some of its elements with a
whole range of other images, students begin to recognise that images are meaningful in
part through their cultural encoding. I develop the question of genre in relation to the

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 G. Rose

Doisneau image by passing around other examples of his work and asking students to
describe their common features. I then contextualise these by suggesting the Doisneau
photograph draws on two genres, those of documentary photography (a black-and-white
photo, its realist authenticity apparently guaranteed by the spontaneous street scene
behind the main figures) and advertising (the striking composition, the joke).
The reading list for the course references what I have found to be key discussions of
the visual conventions of different genres, which students can draw on as their interest
in particular parts of the course focuses. I find the following texts particularly helpful:
Solomon-Godeau (1991) and, for students familiar with Foucault, Tagg (1988) on
documentary photography; Cosgrove (1985), Cosgrove & Daniels (1988) and Daniels
(1993) on the western tradition of landscape painting (although perhaps the most
succinct critique remains Berger [1972, pp. 105-108]); Williams (1974) and Ellis (1982)
on television in general, and Geraghty (1991) on TV soaps; and Ellis (1982), Mulvey
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(1989, pp. 14-26) and Monaco (1981) on Hollywood narrative film. Armes (1988) and
Cubitt (1991) have made a start exploring the still-fluid conventions of video. All the
texts I have mentioned understand genres as a series of aesthetic conventions—which
might concern media, lighting, composition, editing, narrative construction and so
on—but they are all also discussions which place particular genres of visual images in
their social context by examining the social relations through which particular genres
developed and on which particular genres comment.
The intertwining of the aesthetic and the social is also the focus of another question:
• What do the different components of an image signify?
For many analyses of visual images, this is the most crucial question. Ball & Smith
(1992, pp. 31-54) usefully summarise what they describe as symbolist and structuralist
approaches to it; some geographers have deployed similar methods and called them
semiotic (Burgess & Wood, 1988; Hopkins, 1994). This kind of approach describes the
components of an image as signs, which "are divided, for analytic purposes only, into
two parts: the signifier is the material object...the signified is the meaning" (Burgess &
Wood, 1988, p. 108). A particular sign's meaning is given in relation to a wider set of
meanings called the referent system. The analytic task is to explore the particular relation
between a signifier and signified (and there is a terminology to describe different sorts
of relations; see Burgess & Wood, 1988, p. 108; Monaco, 1981, pp. 121-191).
Williamson's (1978) classic study of advertisements used this method to interpret
advertising images, arguing that such images work by transferring the meanings of one
sign system onto another. Thus the signifier of a perfume bottle became a sign of
feminine glamour, for example, by being pictured with the image of a beautiful woman:
the signified 'feminine glamour' is transferred from woman to perfume. Burgess &
Wood (1988) use this method to decode the particular construction of place in a series
of advertisements produced by the London Docklands Development Corporation. They
demonstrate that the referent system deployed in the adverts was the meanings given to
the area by other television programmes, and this allows them to describe the advertise-
ments as ideological, since the understandings of their place held by local people
apparently had no role in what these images of place signified. This case study shows
the need again to consider power relations in image signification:

• Whose referent systems are being deployed to represent a geography?

• Whose referent systems are excluded from this representation?

There are also a number of questions to be asked of the specifically visual dynamics of

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 Teaching Visualised Geographies

the text, for example, which again develop the intersection of the aesthetic with the
social:
• What relationships are established between the components of the image visually?
• Where is the viewer's eye drawn to in the image, and why?
These questions are prompted by the current critical interest in the importance of a
certain kind of gaze to powerful social identities. As psychoanalytically inspired analyses
of film insist, the visual—both looking and being seen—is central to the construction of
social identity. It is also central to the construction of social power, since the powerful
are those who are culturally constituted as looking, as being able to represent, while the
less powerful are constituted as those who are looked at, represented. Perhaps the most
influential essay to make this argument was Mulvey's (1989) discussion of "woman as
image, man as bearer of the look" in Hollywood narrative cinema, but earlier Berger
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(1972) had also argued that a specular division of labour, this time in oil painting, was
fundamental to the constitution of gender relations. This is why Pollock (1988) uses
Doisneau's photo: its visual organisation is highly gendered, and this can be explored
with students by paying careful attention to the image as a text, for example to its depth
of field, organisation of looks and composition of figures. Other work argues that class
distinctions (Tagg, 1988) and racialised difference (Edwards, 1992) are also visualised.
Higson (1984) provides a good example of class difference structuring the representation
of place in his discussion of British 'kitchen-sink' films of the late 1950s and early
1960s. So:

• Does this image's particular look at its subject disempower its subject?
Much recent radical cultural work has responded to these arguments by examining
dominant ways of seeing and exploring new forms which resist or subvert them. This
suggests a further question:
• Does this image comment critically on the characteristics of its genre?
These arguments suggest that an image's effect is often ambiguous and unstable, even
contradictory. Pollock (1994) has suggested that these unstable dynamics of desire can
actually disrupt the cultural referent systems through which images are decoded and
encoded. Her comments suggest, then, that the coherence of an image should not be
assumed. This suggests some further questions:
• Are the relations between the components of this image unstable?
• Is this a contradictory image?
These questions can be useful critical tools for subverting the apparent authority of
dominant forms of geographical knowledge, as I have tried to show in a discussion of
geographers' relation to their idea of 'landscape' (Rose, 1993).
These latter discussions explore the gaze of the producer of the image, but also
examine the relation of the current viewer to the image. This leads to the node concerned
with the processes of 'audiencing' (Fiske, 1994).

Some Questions about Audiences

Geographers have paid very little attention to audiences in their discussion of visualised
geographies, as Burgess (1990) has remarked; yet there are a number of geographies of
audiencing. Some of these involve the way the spaces of display affect the meaning

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 G. Rose

of the image. Some initial questions about where an image was displayed or played
include:
• Where and how would the text have been displayed originally?
• How is it circulated?
• How is it stored?
• How is it re-displayed?
For example, when the Doisneau photograph is reproduced in a glossy monograph of his
work, it means something rather different (Art) from what it might do in the photo-maga-
zine in which I guess it was originally published (Slice of Quirky Life Documentary),
and from what it does when reproduced by Pollock (1988, p. 86) as an example of the
impossibility of an active female spectator (Phallocentric Gaze).
But there are also a number of questions about who would have had access to these
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spaces:
• Who were the original audience(s) for this image?
• Who are the more recent audiences for this text?
Once again, though, more questions are needed to elaborate the significance of the
answers to these questions in relation to the meanings of an image constructed by its
audiences. Early work in cultural studies argued that cultural texts are productive.
Images work to produce social meanings, social identities, social relations, because they
produce particular positions for their audiences; as viewers looks at an image, they are
drawn into its referent systems and positioned by them. Following Williamson (1978),
Burgess & Wood (1988, p. 110) argue that viewers:
...are caught up in an ideological bind. Transformed from individuals into
'subjects', advertisements require that we 'cooperate' with them in making the
necessary transfer of meaning from the referent sign system to the product.
Simultaneously, advertisements offer us pictures of ourselves, as we might be
if we consume the product.
Thus the reader of the text is given a certain social position through its ideologically
loaded signification. This analysis suggests a number of questions about the specificity
of the audience assumed by an image. Some of these questions explore the aesthetics of
the text:
• Where is the spectator positioned in relation to the components of the image?
• What relation does this produce between the image and its viewers?
Others examine the way in which the meaning of this text may depend in part on the
circulation of other, associated texts:
• Is the image one of a series, and how do the preceding and subsequent images affect
its meanings?
• Would the image have had a written text to guide its interpretation in its initial
moment of display, for example a caption or a catalogue entry?
• Is the image represented elsewhere in a way which invites a particular relation to
it, in publicity materials for example, or in reviews?
Others concern the technologies of circulation and display:
• Have the technologies of circulation and display affected the audiences' interpret-
ation of this image?

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• What are the conventions for viewing this technology?

Television is very often used as a kind of visual and aural wallpaper, left on while its
putative 'audience' does other things such as eat, doze, read the paper, do the ironing,
talk on the phone and so on, while cinema invites more sustained and intense audience
involvement (Ellis, 1982). Different kinds of media produce different kinds of audiences.
However, there is no guarantee that the audience will do what the image and its
associated texts invite, as key works in cultural studies have convincingly demonstrated
(Ang, 1985; Morley, 1986; Radway, 1984). Audiences can and actively do rework the
meanings produced at the production and text nodes, and Burgess (1990) has argued
strongly that geographers must not consider the audiences of an image as passive.
Further questions must then include:
• Is more than one interpretation of the image possible?
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• How actively does a particular audience engage with the image?

• Is there any evidence that a particular audience produced a meaning for an image
that differed from the meanings produced at the production or text nodes?
Disagreements among the student audience for the Doisneau photograph can address
these sorts of issues in some detail. Students in my class consistently object to Pollock's
interpretation, for example, arguing that she is reiterating the victimisation of the woman
in the photograph; students often speculate on what the woman might be looking at and
talking about (even suggesting, post-feminists that many of them seem to be, that she
could be enjoying a male nude considerably more attractive than her photographed
husband!). Questions of interpretation may also involve technological considerations.
Halleck (1991, p. 218), for example, has argued that video allows a particularly active
mode of viewing:
One of the most attractive features of a VCR is the control it gives to viewing:
still frame, fast forward, rewind, repeat—these are controls that allow a
selective and critical viewing in an active mode. VCR users are unwilling to
rest as passive viewers. The consuming public demands that the machines they
buy produce and reproduce and have the capacity to time-shift.
However, most discussions of active viewing argue that its source is usually less
technological than social: different social groups have different referent systems which
they bring to bear when decoding visual images. More questions then arise:
• How do different audiences interpret this image?
• How are these audiences different from each other, in terms of class, gender, 'race',
sexuality and so on?
• How do these axes of social identity structure different interpretations?
To analyse the reception of visual images by particular audiences raises a rather different
set of methodological issues, however. Most studies concerned with audiences' renego-
tiation of images' meanings have utilised well-established qualitative techniques, with
some researchers using various ethnographic methods, others more organised interview-
ing strategies (Ball & Smith, 1992, p. 56): to discuss these methods is beyond the scope
of this paper.
Before concluding, though, I think it is crucial to pay particular attention to one
member of the audience in particular—the analyst asking all these questions and
encouraging others to ask them. Unlike their more ethnographically inspired colleagues,
those geographers responding to 'the cultural turn' by examining visual images have

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 G. Rose

rarely engaged in self-reflection about their own specificity as one kind of audience for
the text they are interpreting (nor, indeed, do those undertaking the semiotic kind of
analyses described above). Yet, if audiences really do matter, and if partial knowledge
is not to represent itself as universal knowledge, this specificity is crucial to acknowl-
edge. There are a number of ways to reflect on the particularity of the critic as spectator,
not all of which entail autobiography (Rose, 1995), but the partiality of the geographer's
account of the meaning of an image must be recognised.

Concluding Comments
I hope in this short essay to have offered some useful suggestions for structuring a
discussion about the social processes of signification through which visualised geogra-
phies are constituted. I have done this less by prescribing a particular analytical
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technique and more by posing a number of theoretically informed questions that can be
addressed to a visual text, which, used selectively and flexibly, examine the social,
technical and aesthetic aspects of the production and audiencing of texts. In the context
of my particular course, these questions are meant as prompts to further enquiry, to more
questions, including some questions much more specific in relation to a particular image
and others much more specific in relation to a more carefully developed theoretical
discussion. I hope, however, that they at least provide a starting point for encouraging
students to discuss visualised images of geography critically.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the 1994-95 class of students at Edinburgh University for making
me think more carefully about teaching the interpretation of images, and I would also
like to thank Catherine Nash, Charles Withers and two referees for their helpful
comments on a previous version of this paper. This paper was written as part of a
research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number
RR000235698).

Correspondence: Gillian Rose, Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh,

Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, Scotland, UK.

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