INTENT

I have been finding recurring themes of intent through the works of the case studies I have been focusing on. I found an essay with this quote in it (sourced in my dissertation bibliography)

Itis important to remember that there are three sites, or positions from which to investigate the meaning of an image; 1) the site of image production, 2) the site of image consumption, and 3) the site of the text itself (van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2006). 

This quote summed up perfectly what I have been thinking about the work I have been analysing and creating. I had been questioning whether you can translate sexual agency into illustration as obviously an illustrated character cannot consent of have power. Some may say Manet's Olympia is a sexual subject and acting via sexual agency, some disagree due to the fact a man still authored it.

When looking at these things it's important to look at the context. I feel it would be ridiculous to see a piece of work and try and figure out meaning without any context to it. Obviously there will always be some level of audience opinion when it comes to viewing art but you've kind of got to take the artists original intent into consideration.

Annie Sprinkle's work without any context could be considered as a glorified piece of pornography. The work I've been making would just look like senseless body horror without the context of the research project behind it.


Intertextuality describes the way in which the meanings of any image depend not only on their essential, formal features, but also crucially on the meanings carried by other images that precede or surround them (Rose 2007). Following the work of Julia Kristeva, the influential theorist Roland Barthes (1977) argued that that the (visual) text was a tissue of quotations, originating from sources outside of the text.