Oldal 78 [78]
Playing With Otherness: Within and Beyond Stereotypes in Visual Representations
gain importance. I would call them seriousness and humor. When James E. Combs
writes about the present, he uses the opposition of seriousness and lightness"" (2011),
but for the period from the end of the nineteenth century until almost the second
half of the twentieth century, the term lightness did not find application (what is
more, nineteenth century’s seriousness might not be the same as the seriousness of
here and now). Satire could be counted as radical (serious) representation, but not
humorous.
In the period when modernizing keynotes dominated the visual representations,
it was an ingrained principle that what had been freely used in the past was not toler¬
ated currently. In other words, there was a strong focus on what everything should
be like, and what was still present was being ridiculed. The humorous and mocking
songs, caricatures, films, and so forth come into existence mainly as a replay of ev¬
eryday situations. It is a game of and with the stereotypes. Humor is also frequently
shared during periods of social change and of crises, emerging as part of discourse.
What makes an issue or a point funny and mocking? Is it the content, the
performer/author, the audience, or even the place? It seems that it is all of these
together, which is why jokes are often incomprehensible to those who belong to
different cultural spaces.
Employing serious representations, we can study the process of making referen¬
tial representations of reality, constructed and reflected in the ways of conceptual¬
izing the world, selecting the data from the actual standards and conventions. There
are culturally shaped representations of the topics of landscape, portraits, costume,
and folk culture. Using these representations, we concentrate more on the study of
the ways of reading and perceiving the reality than on the world itself.
It has to be understood as a congruence of ascribed features with an existing
knowledge about them rather than with reality. The illustration becomes a part
of something that can be narrated as a story. A picture goes beyond what is visible
and it needs to be seen as a “situation” and treated with intention. Representations
serve to refer to a bigger entity. Thus, they include culturally shaped meanings and
become the ways of comprehending the world. They turn into public expressions
and—as Thomas Mitchell claimed—they are the constituents of the forms of life,
the practices and traditions within which we must make epistemological, ethical,
and political choices (1994: 64). The photographs or the illustrations that are tan¬
gled up in the conventions have more significance for us as the model images of a
passing reality than as the reality itself."
The difference between serious'* and humorous representations seems to lie in
16 In general, he provides the opposition of seriousness versus lightness and fun.
'7 On the subject of the mechanism of creation of model images of reality and possible readings of
photographs, see Magdalena Sztandara (2006: 11).
'8 Refers to realistic description, dominated by the mimetic function, referred to the conventions of
presenting the visual world, the knowledge of which conditioned their reception and possible inter¬
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