Contrast & juxtaposition

By now you should be able to look at this in terms of contrast:

• It's mostly a fuzzy, low-contrast image, of water, clouds, fog, haze. Everything's mushy, no hard edges.
• But there's a tonal contrast in the barges in the foreground.
• And there's a colour contrast with the sun, making it pop forward even though it's in the distance.

That's a personal question, and different people will have different responses.

This painting might make you feel dreamy, happy, relaxed, sad, curious, wishful, bored, irritated, offended... 

But whatever the case, these are all basically moods.

Compare that to the next image.

• If we were to hazard a guess, we'd say you were at first shocked or surprised—an immediate emotional response.
• And then you probably became focused—curious, puzzled, confused.
• And you probably started to have specific thoughts: "What is this? What's going on? Why is she doing that? Are those cars moving? Is she crossing in the middle of the street or is this a crosswalk and we just can't see the markings?"

And this is a very different reaction to looking at Impression, Sunrise.

• Tonally, this is a high-contrast image: the road is effectively a light field, and against it the cars, woman, and pram are silhouettes, so we see them as contrasting shapes.
• The juxtaposition of these elements amplifies their qualities: we see the cars are round and strong like boulders, while the woman and pram are delicate—and the silhouettes exaggerate this.

But the real impact of the image is not the juxtaposition of physical 'things' as much as our expectations.

We as viewers have all sorts of pre-existing meanings and associations with mothers, children, prams, cars, and roads.

When they are combined as in this picture—in a way that breaks the rules and expectations in our minds—it triggers a cascade of feelings and thoughts that we quickly try to clear up.

In this case, it's fast, because this is a visual joke.

You think, "Hey, wait a minute! That's not right! What's going on?"

And you look more closely and realise this is a trick of the camera.

Once we've figured it out, the image becomes less interesting, but not every scene resolves itself that quickly.

• Tonal contrast: Man's black jacket up high, dog's black body down low (the image wouldn't be quite as vivid if the man's pants were also black, because they'd start to blend with the dog).
• Physical juxtaposition: Man, dog, rain, umbrella.
• Unity: Walking together.

The real interest in this image is about status and species:

• Who's in charge here? Who is higher status? The human with all the resources and power? Or the dachshund who has a human supporting their every need?
• Or is it really 'every' need? The dog is on a leash, after all. What about the need to be free, and run like the wolves? Is that what daschunds want?

Again, it's not just the juxtaposition of purely physical elements that makes this image interesting, it's what those specific elements mean, and how those meanings clash and clang in our minds.

You can see in an image like this how contrast and juxtaposition start to blur as concepts:

• Contrast: Dark mass of people in the foregound, light billboard in the background. Small vs large. Black vs white. Resigned vs overjoyed. Reality vs advertising.
• Juxtaposition: Black people made homeless by a flood queuing against a billboard showing a white family having a great time in their car.
• Unity: They are people living in the same country, experiencing their lives, connected by a society and economy.

You might have heard the term 'irony'.

It's a slippery concept. It roughly means 'presenting a version of reality in such a way that you undermine or contradict yourself'.

For instance, saying "Everything's great!" when everyone is homeless from a flood and standing in a line trying to get their lives back together could be ironic—or else it could be sarcastic, or delusional; it can be hard to tell.

Context and intent is key. Irony deliberately uses contrasts in content, tone, and context to highlight some gap between stated reality and actual reality.

Irony relies on a kind of emotional distance, too. The people in this photo probably don't look at the billboard and think, "Well, that's ironic."

Instead, the photographer saw the irony from a distance—the clash between the advertised experience and the lived experience—and captured the contrast at arm's length, rendering it ironic.

(But all it would take are some changes in details to create other emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, resentment, determination, and so on.)

There's a phrase often used in scriptwriting: "On the nose."

It means something is too obvious.

The image of the flood survivors queuing in front of the billboard could be accused of being on the nose, simply because the contrast is so extreme. The billboard is so obviously inappropriate given the circumstances, it's almost unreal.

If the billboard didn't feature a white family, if it didn't make such wild superlative claims ("World's highest standard of living!"), the photo would be less obvious, and almost more plausible.

That's not to diminish the image; this is a famous, striking, powerful photo. 

But compare it to the next image, and see what you notice.

This is an interesting image because it is more subtle than the other images we've seen. It's not as high-contrast.

What can we see?

• Tonality: Light of the windows and faces vs darkness of window frames and shoulders. Blankness of the street vs texture of the faces.
• Juxtaposition: Women, bus, windows, world.
• Unity: The women sitting together, on the bus, looking at the world in which they live, each thinking their own thoughts.

Here's what these two images have in common: they both present a line of Black people positioned against a framed version of the world.

• In the flood photo, the framed version of the world is the billboard.
• In the bus photo, the framed version of the world is the street outside.
• But in the flood photo, the billboard features a white family in a car with a dog while a billboard declares, "It's the American way!"
• Whereas in the bus photo, there's nothing—the frame is empty, which means we focus on the women and their thoughts about the world outside.

You'll see different things in these images based on your particular history and life experiences, but if you know anything about the history of the United States, then the resonance in both these images comes from the contrast between Black lives and American society as a whole.

• The billboard image flashes the contrast in our face, draws an underline, and points arrows to it.
• The bus image leaves us to fill in space for ourselves: the space outside the windows, the space in the women's minds.

However, given the low-key mood of the bus picture, plus the period and context, maybe we imagine that these women are thinking about something related to the billboard photo: that, outside those windows, it's still the American way.