Calendario de Actividades

So far we have discussed the role of colour as a marker of naturalistic modality, in terms of three scales:

(1) Colour saturation, a scale running from full colour saturation to the absence of colour; that is, to black and white.

(2) Colour differentiation, a scale running from a maximally diversified range of colours to monochrome.

(3) Colour modulation, a scale running from fully modulated colour, with, for example, the use of many different shades of red, to plain, unmodulated colour.

At one end of these scales the particular dimension of colour is maximally reduced. At the other end it is most fully articulated, used to its maximum potential. Each point of the scale has a certain modality value in terms of the naturalistic standard. However, the point of highest modality does not coincide with either extreme of the scale: naturalistic modality increases as articulation increases, but at a certain point it reaches its highest value and thereafter it decreases again. Naturalistic modality scales could therefore be represented as in the following example:

We will now discuss the other key markers of visual modality on which we already touched in our discussion of figure 5.3.

(4) Contextualization, a scale running from the absence of background to the most fully articulated and detailed background.

Within the naturalistic coding orientation, the absence of setting lowers modality. By being ‘decontextualized’, shown in a void, represented participants become generic, a ‘typical example’, rather than particular, and connected with a particular location and a specific moment in time. The scale of ‘contextualization’ runs from ‘full contextualization’, to ‘plain, unmodulated background’. One step away from ‘full contextualization’ we find settings which are out of focus to a greater or lesser degree, or which lose detail through overexposure, resulting in a kind of ethereal brightness, or underexposure, resulting in muddy darkness, or through the loss of visual detail in the depiction. Further decontextu- alization can be achieved through ellipsis: a few ‘props’ suffice to suggest a setting, or a small, irregularly shaped patch of green under the feet of a figure with a few lines suggesting grass indicates the setting, while the rest of the paper is left blank. Or perhaps the background may merely show an irregular pattern of light and shade, or a field of unmodulated colour, or black, or white.

Again, the most fully articulated background does not have the highest naturalistic modality. The limitations imposed by the resolution of standard 35mm photographic emulsions and by the depth of field of standard lenses have accustomed us to images in which the background is less articulated than the foreground. When the background is sharper and more defined than this, a somewhat artificial, ‘more than real’ impression will result – as, for instance in older Hollywood movies shot in a studio with back projection (a close-up of an actor in a car, in front of a rear window behind which we see the receding landscape in sharp focus), or in much Surrealist painting, such as in the work of Salvador Dali.

(5) Representation, a scale running from maximum abstraction to maximum representa- tion of pictorial detail.

An image may show every detail of the represented participants: the individual strands of hair, the pores in the skin, the creases in the clothes, the individual leaves of the tree, and so on, or it may abstract from detail to a greater or lesser degree. Again, there is a point beyond which a further increase of detail becomes ‘hyper-real’ and hence lower in modality from the point of view of ‘photographic’ naturalism. Similarly, in discussing decontextualization, above, we have pointed out that reduced representation of detail may form one of the ways in which the modality of backgrounds, of what is ‘distant’, is lower than the modality of the foreground (there is a parallel here with the lower modality of the past tense in language).

In photography it is not only sharpness of focus, but also exposure which can reduce detail. In artwork a variety of techniques could be ranked on a scale from maximum to minimum detail. Texture can become stylized, rendered by lines which trace the folds in the clothes, for example, and these lines may be many and fine, as in detailed engravings, or few and coarse, as in quick and ready styles of drawing. In medical drawings, for example,

texture may become entirely conventional: dots to indicate the texture of one layer of skin, short, curved lines to indicate the texture of another. Texture can also be omitted altogether – the participant is then represented merely by the lines that trace its contour. Beyond this, the contour may be simplified to different degrees: a head may become a circle, the eyes two dots, the mouth a short, straight line. Diagrams and geometrical art take abstraction even further and reduce the shape of things to a small vocabulary of abstract forms, as in the paintings of Mondrian, or in figure 5.2, de Saussure’s schematized ‘speech circuit’ diagram.

(6) Depth, a scale running from the absence of depth to maximally deep perspective. By the criteria of standard naturalism, central perspective has highest modality, followed by angular-isometric perspective, followed by frontal-isometric perspective, followed by depth created by overlapping only. Again, perspective can become ‘more than real’, as when strong convergence of vertical lines is shown, or a ‘fish-eye’ perspective is used.

(7) Illumination, a scale running from the fullest representation of the play of light and shade to its absence.

Naturalistic depictions represent participants as they are affected by a particular source of illumination. Less naturalistic images, on the other hand, may abstract from illumination, and show shadows only in so far as they are required to model the volume, especially of round objects. They have ‘shading’ rather than shadow. Or they use shading to indicate receding areas and highlights to indicate protruding areas, often in ways which have no explanation in terms of the logic of illumination. This can be done to different degrees: with a fully modulated darkening of the areas of shadow; with just two degrees of brightness, one for the ‘lit’ areas and one for those in shadow; with more or less dense hatching or dotting of the shaded areas; and so on. At the extreme end of the scale, light and shade are ab- stracted from altogether, and line rather than shading is used to indicate receding contours. (8) Brightness, a scale running from a maximum number of different degrees of brightness to just two degrees: black and white, or dark grey and lighter grey, or two brightness values of the same colour.

Brightness values can also contrast to a greater or lesser degree: in one picture the difference between the darkest and the lightest area may be very great (deep blacks, bright whites), in another the difference may be minimal, so that a misty, hazy effect is created. The paintings of Rembrandt are interesting from this point of view, in part because his use of illumination and brightness is so often invoked as a paradigm example of naturalism, and in part because of the way his subtle divergences from naturalism often acquire ideational functions, in a broadly allegorical sense.

The ability of photography to render black and white is limited, as is its ability to differentiate brightness values. Again, a contrast range and a range of brightness values

which exceeds this ability may be experienced as ‘more than real’ and hence as being of lower modality.

It follows from our discussion that modality is realized by a complex interplay of visual cues. The same image may be ‘abstract’ in terms of one or several markers and ‘naturalistic’ in terms of others. Impressionist paintings, for example, often have a narrow brightness range, and abstract from light and shadow, but they have a highly naturalistic approach to colour. Yet, from this diversity of cues an overall assessment of modality is derived by the viewer.

From all this it might seem that the realization of modality in images is much more complex and finely graded than the realization of modality in language. Yet language, too, allows complex combinations of different modality cues. Take, for instance, the sentence I absolutely don’t think he could possibly have done it. Is this ‘low’, ‘middle’ or ‘high’ modality? How does one ‘compute’ these various modality cues into one ‘degree of credibility’? Frequently there are even contradictions: It is probably definitely true that . . . And in language, too, the value of modality cues depends on context. In academic writing, for example, qualifications such as It may well be the case . . . or It is quite possible that . . . (both low modality, strictly speaking) serve in fact to increase the credibility of the text, as indicators of the care with which the writer’s judgements were made, and hence of the reliability of these judgements.