My father is an art historian. One of the criticisms I remember him leveling against non-art historians over breakfast was that “x doesn’t know how to read an image.” I had always assumed this was one of those criticisms that don’t really mean anything like: “x totally misrepresents Foucault here” or “x’s discourse is hegemonic.” The past few weeks have given a couple of examples, however, of just how right my father was and how wrong I was. It seems no-one, including myself, really knows how to read an image.
The first is the case of the Swedish Culture Minister and the racist cake. Lena Liljeroth was photographed smiling as she cut into a cake that depicted a racist caricature of a black woman. This has been taken as, at best, a misjudged, ill thought-out stunt and, at worst, a deeply problematic symbol of lingering racism in Swedish society. My first reaction was that it was a provocative post-colonial critique. The head of the cake was replaced by the head of a real person who was screaming with pain throughout the proceedings. My interpretation: Europe has been gleefully cutting up the proverbial African and eating their very flesh oblivious to the human being in pain underneath the surface (vel sim).
Later, I learned that the artist intended for it to be a protest against female circumcision, so it shows what I know. But, since when has the author been the best judge of their work? The rest of the world seems to have viewed this as simply a ‘racist cake’. I am not sure which of the three of us (me, the artist, or the rest of the world) is image-illiterate.
In the second case, I willingly plead complete aporia. In the most recent issue of Foreign Policy, Mona Eltahawy wrote an article entitled Why Do They Hate Us?: The Real War on Women is in the Middle East. The pictures accompanying the article have already become controversial which depict a naked woman whose entire body is painted black except for the eyes creating a niqab.
This time, I am less sure of what to make of it. Samia Errazouki sees these images as the most infuriating thing about an article that she finds deeply upsetting. “The image,” she says, “degraded and insulted every woman I know that wears or has ever worn the niqab.” The focus on the niqab is just another way of sexualizing the oriental woman. In the past 48 hours, other responses have become too numerous to detail here (even FP ran its own debate) If one were forced to give a counter-argument, one could say that the message is: whether in a niqab or naked a woman is always an object of sexual attention and nothing more. It brings together the two sides of male sexual obsession with women, male pressures to cover and to uncover. Though, I must say this conclusion did not immediately leap out at me. Either way, this picture is designed to be provocative.
The trouble is that there are no rules for how to read an image. I cannot quote someone a sentence to prove that they are wrong, nor can I tell them to read it again in full. An image makes an immediate impression but, unless I am the only one in this boat, most people are unsure of exactly how to interpret it. A picture in the public sphere is seldom allowed to be ironic (pace Magritte). Few of the people who reacted so passionately to the two images discussed admitted that this might have been the intention in the first place. I am not proposing answers to these questions, but at a publication like Baraza Ijtihad, which embraces the new multimedia form of scholarship, these are issues that must be addressed.
Photos courtesy of:
Raphael Cormack is an MA student in the MESAAS department at Columbia University, and is working on attitudes of Greek literature and culture in 20th century Egypt.