1. Analyzing Posters

2. Brief History of Posters
19th century: posters were literally plastered or painted onto the sides of buildings and specialty kiosks.
Printing technology decreased the cost and literacy rates improved increasing the number and kinds of “posters”.
Since designed for public space, consumed by masses, poster design is economical; read quickly.

3. You know a lot already Looking at the following poster example:
What visual aspects of the poster tell you it’s probably for a movie?
When do you think this poster was made? Why?
What kind of movie is being publicized here? What visual aspects encourage you to make that judgment?
Are there other ways to “read” this poster? E.g. Feminist narrative?

4. 1
Title: Top left because we read left to right
Title: Large, relative to other objects 2
Title: Simple, sans serif font for easy reading
Woman: Intentionally larger, see her second.
Colors: they aren’t contrasting colors, so woman doesn’t pop; notice too her body draws your eye down the poster. 3
Type: Non-essential information in thin font

5. Using what you know to analyze
Using faces
Always look for the position of faces
What we already know
Follow intuitions and then research for confirmation
What we know because we have bodies
Think of the Uncle Sam poster; why do you think it’s almost life-size?
What we know because we live in particular times and places
Why do you think Uncle Sam is white? What cultural understandings of ethnicity might be at work in your poster?

6. Documentary Photography
Photos don’t actually “capture” reality because reality isn’t “out there”
It’s four dimensional experience vs two dimensional reality of the photograph
Photos are always rhetorical because photographers had to make choices about how an audience's attention would be directed and shaped by looking at the photo.

7. The rhetorical photo
Photographs direct our eyes and attention through vectors of attention
Photos focus our attentions on particular aspects of scene by framing
Photos focus our attention on aspects of a scene by using cropping

8. Vectors of Attention
How is your sense of a photograph shaped by someone looking directly at you versus away from you?
When vector of attention is directed at an audience, it’s a way of pulling you into the scene; establishing emotion (pathos)
Vectors of attention are about arrangement and so they’re about logos.

9. Framing
Vectors are about arranging elements, framing is about what to include at all.
Framing asks you to take on the physical perspective of the photographer relative to what’s photographed.
Ask: how does the possible placement of objects/shapes affect what’s happened and perceived?

10. Cropping Think about your assumptions of the following photo.
Then think about how those assumptions were changed based on what part of the image was revealed.

15. In-Class Exercise

16. Homework
Wiki
Discussion