Applying Judgement And Graduation To A Photograph

Martin & Rose (2007: 326):

In APPRAISAL terms, the photo of the boy invokes a positive judgement of tenacity that must be read in relation to the texts that surround him.  The protest against the regime construed by his raised fist reflects the tenacious resistance of Mandela and his comrades as recounted in the adjacent Freedom text.  The fist can then be read as amplifying his tenacity to the level of defiance (more so than if he had waved or saluted with an open hand).  This is a retrospective reading of his tenacity as defiance against the old regime;  on the other hand his tenacity can also be read prospectively as youthful determination in the nation’s hopes for the future. These are complementary readings as protest against the regime vs celebration of its overthrow, that are expanded by the texts above and below the photo — image-text relations that are discussed in the following section.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin & Rose are not identifying the meaning created by either the photographer or the boy in the photograph, but by specific viewers of the photograph (themselves); see further below.

[2] To be clear, if the meaning of the image depends on the accompanying text, then the meaning is made by both semiotic systems, not by the image alone.

[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose construe three levels of meaning within the image:

• the tenacious resistance of Mandela and his comrades, realised by
• the protest against the regime, realised by
• his raised fist.

More specifically, the middle level of meaning, the protest against the regime, is metaphorically encoded by reference to the lowest level, his raised fist, and the highest level, the tenacious resistance of Mandela and his comrades, is metaphorically decoded by reference to the middle level, the protest against the regime.

That is, the judgement of tenacity in this image of a boy is made on Mandela and his comrades by Martin & Rose.

[4] To be clear, here Martin & Rose have become confused by their levels of abstraction and incongruously transferred their judgement of the tenacity from Mandela and his comrades to the boy ('his tenacity') in the photograph. This is analogous to transferring a judgement of a movie character to the actor playing the rôle. With this confusion, they claim, without supporting argument, that the shape of the boy's hand is an amplification of his tenacity to the level of defiance, despite the fact that 'tenacity' means persistence, whereas 'defiance' means resistance.

[5] To be clear, here again Martin & Rose misattribute the tenacity they have ascribed to Mandela and his comrades to the boy ('his tenacity') in the photograph, and decode his tenacity by reference to youthful determination in the nation's hope for the future.

[6] To be clear, Halliday (1985: xvii) comments on discourse analysis seem apposite here:

A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.

[7] To be clear, as can be seen below, the texts above and below the photograph of the boy (p324) do not expand the meanings of the photograph, as interpreted by Martin & Rose:

'regimes' above photo of young boy

On the day of the inauguration I was overwhelmed with a sense of history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, a few years after the bitter Anglo-Boer war and before my own birth, the white-skinned peoples of South Africa patched up their differences and erected a system of racial domination against the dark-skinned peoples of their own land.

'effects' below photo of young boy

The structure they created formed the basis of one of the harshest, most inhumane, societies the world has ever known. Now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, and my own eighth decade as a man, that system has been overturned forever and replaced by one that recognised the rights and freedoms of all peoples regardless of the colour of their skin. (Mandela 1996: 202)