Deck 1: Images, Power, and Politics

Question 1

____________ refers to the use of language, marks, and images to create meaning about the world around us.

A) Interpellation
B) Reproduction
C) Interpretation
D) Representation

Answer 1

D

Question 2

Through his practice of arriving with a camera at the scene of a crime quickly and composing a news story about it out of his car trunk, ____________ may be described as a proto social-media journalist.

A) Scott McCloud
B) Timothy O' Sullivan
C) Weegee
D) Robert Frank

Answer 2

C

Question 3

What is the study of signs, symbols, and how we interpret them?

A) semiotics
B) hermeneutics
C) myth
D) mimesis

Answer 3

A

Question 4

____________ signs, as discussed by Charles Peirce, involve an "existential" relationship between the sign and the interpretant. This means they have co-existed in the same place at the same time.

A) Iconic
B) Indexical
C) Literal
D) Symbolic

Question 5

According to Saussure's semiotic system, a(n) ____________ is an image that refers to something outside of its individual components, something (or someone) that has great symbolic meaning for many people.

A) icon
B) symbol
C) index
D) referent

Question 6

We make meaning of the material world through understanding images, objects, and other entities in their specific ____________.

A) symbolism
B) theoretical contexts
C) cultural contexts
D) allegories

Question 7

Throughout its history, photography has been associated with ____________.

A) myth
B) realism
C) symbolism
D) ideology

Question 8

The ____________ meaning of Robert Frank's Trolley-New Orleans (1955), in which black and white passengers ride a trolley, is dependent upon the viewer's cultural and historical knowledge of race and civil rights activism in the United States.

A) mythic
B) denotative
C) semiotic
D) connotative

Question 9

Henri-Horace Roland de la Porce's Still Life (c. 1765) depicts an array of food and drink on a table, yet it can also be read as a ____________ of the transience of earthly life.

A) studium
B) sign
C) signifier
D) signified

Question 10

A 1999 anti-smoking billboard depicted the usually rugged and individualistic Marlboro Man as sick with emphysema. According to Barthes's model of semiotics, this advertisement was intended to change the ____________ associated with Marlboro from masculinity to death.

A) studium
B) sign
C) signifier
D) signified

Question 11

Emmett Till's mother insisted that her son's body be placed on view in an open-casket funeral for the press to document and the public to see. Her decision went against the wishes of the authorities in Mississippi, who wanted the mutilated body quickly buried. Mamie Till's decision is an example of ____________.

A) realism
B) visuality
C) countervisuality
D) appropriation

Question 12

The authors argue that it is wrong to assume that camera images may be produced without human intervention. Even dashboard, surveillance, and drone camera images involve human intervention. This is because the designers and programmers of these cameras ____________.

A) created machines that often do not work
B) turn them on and off
C) are well versed in the history of still photography
D) made decisions about their design and operation based on social norms and standards

Question 13

What is a criticism of "citizen journalism" cited in this chapter?

A) Due to the ubiquity of images from a given event, it is harder to interpret what definitively occurred.
B) Photojournalists must compete with "amateur" mobile-phone photographers who do not get paid for their labor.
C) The images produced by citizen journalists are usually poor in quality, subverting the field of photojournalism.
D) The location at and time during which an image was taken is too easily altered to trust that most images of an event are truthful records.

Question 14

Our knowledge that images can be ambiguous and easily altered is in constant tension with a photograph's ____________.

A) signifier
B) representation
C) studium
D) punctum

Question 15

The belief that to see is to know suggests that if only one could see everything, one could understand all. As amplified by #notabugsplat, however, the distanced perspective of a drone creates a(n) ____________ visual economy.

A) reflexive
B) humanizing
C) mythical
D) inhumane

Question 16

As the popularity of image manipulation software increased, so did the interest in the question of photographic truth. Which of the following images was scrutinized intensively as part of this scholarly inquiry?

A) Timothy O'Sullivan, Gettysburg, Pa. Dead Confederate Soldier in "the Devil's Den" (1863)
B) Dorothy Lange, Migrant Mother (1936)
C) Jeff Widener, Tank Man (aka Unknown Protester) (1989)
D) Robert Frank, Trolley-New Orleans (1955)

Question 17

Levi posts a Facebook selfie of his extended family enjoying themselves on the first day of their Hanukkah celebration. This is an important "Kodak moment" that documents the particular occasion and also affirms family ____________.

A)individuality
B) indexicality
C) mimesis
D) ideology

Question 18

Which of the following most affects our understanding of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother as an iconic image?

A) a still life portrait
B) a Madonna and child painting
C) a photograph of a civil rights protest
D) a Woman's Day magazine cover

Question 19

At a sorority mixer, Suki captures the varied expressions on the faces of a group of her friends who are not aware of her camera and whose attention is focused on something not within the frame of her picture. In these respects, her photo most resembles which of the following images?

A) Weegee, The First Murder (1941)
B) Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936)
C) Cover of Paris Match, no. 326, June 25 - July 2, 1955
D) Timothy O'Sullivan, Gettysburg, Pa. Dead Confederate Soldier in "the Devil's Den" (1863)

Question 20

Several students who attended a massive protest at Hudson University sent photos taken on their phones to the Hudson Gazette. The one the Gazette decided to publish depicted a single individual armed with a can of spray paint. This image was likely selected for its ____________.

A) cultural complexity
B) punctum
C) visual simplicity
D) interpretive labor

Question 21

Describe Roland Barthes's concept of myth as it is used in this chapter.

Question 22

Why does photography seem to fit the positivist way of thinking?

Question 23

How has photography lost its sense of "what has been" that derives from its indexical quality?

Question 24

How does Ferdinand de Saussure define sign and signifier?

Question 25

Explain how Rene Magritte's work The Treachery of Images plays with ideas of representation.

Question 26

How does J. W. Orr's engraving Harvesting the Sugar Cane (1853) depict the enactment of power through visuality?