To study the social life of the images (Campt, 2012, p. 6) in the object lesson picture books, I employ a visual discourse analysis based on Rose (2016) that functions as a systematic grid for the messy connections that the images and their discourse bring about. This grid works with three modalities – the social, compositional, and technological modality – and four sites of the image: the site of production, of the image itself, of circulation and of audiencing.
The asset of this intersecting analysis of modalities and sites of images is that it enables us to include but then go beyond iconographic and iconological analysis of images and consider the social, technological and material elements that are imbued in the discursive making of pictures. At the same time, the visual manifestations or aesthetics of the discourse are being taken seriously; rather than disregarding the visual forms as empty or simply functional, here they are understood as deeply cultural and material.
On the site of production of the picture books, we may consider how particular ideas of Nature and childhood as part of the reform education movement informed the emergence and figuration of the educational images, including the cultural, social, political and epistemological underpinnings. Furthermore, the role of editorial houses in the production of the picture books, genre, common practices and conventions of drawing and printing technologies are relevant. Also, the biographies of the authors and translators, all of them teachers in primary, secondary or higher education, are important to better understand their cultural and intellectual embedding.
On the site of circulation, we aim to trace the travelling of the picture books and their images, i.e. how the pictures were sold and bought, who organised their circulation, and where the picture books went. Here, once again, the editorial houses as well as authors and translators are of concern. The site of circulation also opens the possibility for a reflexive moment as the images continue to circulate, mobilised in the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive and its workshops but also in municipal and state archives. This reflexivity is welcomed and worked with in the performative-archival practice.
The image itself as a site is rooted much in the visual and material affordances of the images, considering motifs, icons, themes, and the materiality of the images bound as picture books. The iconological analysis of singular images is enriched by the study of representational patterns (see also Pilarczyk & Mietzner, 2005).
The site of audiencing is asking for already existing interpretations of the images (social modality), which in this case can be found, for example, in reviews of the picture books that were printed in educational journals. The content analysis of Swiss, German and Portuguese educational journals (1870-1914) serves the purpose of understanding how the usage of images as educational materials was discussed by the educational community at the time.
In its compositional modality, the site of audiencing is concerned with the viewing positions offered by the images, with the gaze that it produces and/or favours. Also, relations to other texts and images are examined that might be important to consider the possibilities of interpretation. It is also here, through the site of audiencing, that reflexivity and the rootedness of my archival research in the now are stressed, for if I ask the question “Who looks at the image in what way?” that necessarily includes myself as a researcher and arts educator in the present. This reflexive move informs the educational strategies developed in this research project.
So, what does visual discourse analysis allow us to do? Through the visual discourse analysis, we analyse the composition and meaning potentials of single images, for example, of Nature and childhood, as well as the visual discursive formations in their complexities and contradictions, including the invisibilities or erasures that are present in the picture books (Rose, 2016, p. 212). The visual discourse analysis allows us to focus on the visual material specifically, while nevertheless, the intertextuality, i.e. the images’ relation with other texts (captions, manuals, educational discourse, etc.) and other images can be analysed.
Studying visual lacunae offers an understanding of the discourse as much as its structure and regulations because what is being suppressed points towards the boundaries of discourse; its demarcation in relation to what it borders in order to constitute what can be found within (Betscher, 2014; Rose, 2016, p. 157). We may ask: What imaginaries and subjects were not possible to be visualised or imagined in the object lesson method and its educational materials?
To sum it up, doing a visual discourse analysis means studying single images in their intersecting sites and modalities; tracing repetitive motifs, tropes, scenes and icons, and putting them into a meaningful relation to each other, as well as studying the lacunae of the visual discourse.
Visual cultural analysis and arts-based research go hand in hand in the performative-archival practice. I have found it particularly fruitful to engage in conversations about the visual discourse that the picture books are constitutive of during the workshops by mobilising guiding questions in the form of a list or a graphic, both adapting Rose's (2016) proposals.
Particularly if the workshop participants are not familiar with visual discourse analysis, these two devices allow for the communication of the method in a relatively short time frame and enable a more independent use of the questions by the participants in the exercises during the session and potentially beyond it.
None of the layers in the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive is assigned only the strategy “interrogating the visual discourse”. That is due to the fact that I always combined the analysis with an exercise that works on the visual level. Thus, during the workshop settings, the visual discourse analysis often occurred in conversations that would not translate into a material trace. The written part of my thesis performs that task in written form. Nevertheless, I argue that the questions mobilised through the devices of the visual discourse analysis and the collective discussions informed and dialogued with the visual-based exercises and arts-based outputs. In a sense, this strategy is foundational to the archive as such and its methodology, which is why the majority of the layers produced by me in my continuous performative-archival practice are linked to this strategy.
Furthermore, I attached the tag to all layers that resulted from exercises in which the above-mentioned questions and arts-based exercises were part of a joint pedagogical activity.
The two variations of worksheets with the questions of the visual discourse analysis: on the top the worksheet used in the workshop PerformArquivo both in English and Portuguese; below the graphic, thus far only in Portuguese, employed in the seminar session Images of Nature's Child - a history workshop TODAY.
Evans, Jessica, & Hall, Stuart (Eds). (1999). Visual culture: The reader. SAGE in association with the Open University.
Lister, Martin, & Wells, Liz. (2000). Seeing Beyond Belief: Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analysing the Visual. In The Handbook of Visual Analysis. SAGE.
Pilarczyk, Ulrike, & Mietzner, Ulrike. (2005). Das reflektierte Bild: Die seriell-ikonografische Fotoanalyse in den Erziehungs- und Sozialwissenschaften. Julius Klinkhardt.
Rose, Gillian. (2016). Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (4th edn). Sage. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0708/2006927695.html