Compo..what?

          In chapter 6 of Reading Images by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, the meaning of different types of composition is fully discussed. The first major example they use is Sony's website. The authors discuss how Sony uses the composition of its homepage to display what might be versus what is. They claim that "the top part shows the pleasure derived from using the company's products, [...]while the bottom part shows a range of actual products" (183). By stating this, the authors mean that the top of the page shows what could be while the bottom part of the page allows customers to order the actual products and make those products part of their lives.

Did the Green light really mean something?

          In another part of their argument, the authors claimed that magazines, books, etc all have what is given on the left page and what is new on the right page. Given means that the reader should already know what is happening on that page, or it is information they have been confronted with before. New means that the information is new to the reader and they should interpret it as such. I think that this might not always be true, but the authors have constructed their argument in such a way that they can argue their claim to always be true. I relate this to certain books and short stories as well as works of art in which the creator did not necessarily put a certain symbol into their work or that they did not give it as much meaning as an analyst perceives. In other words, they can always argue that this claim is true when it might not always be.
          The last point that I would like to touch upon is the authors discussion of visual composition. I thought it was incredibly interesting that other cultures focus on a central composition, while photography students in the US are taught that this is very bad composition. In previous religion classes, I have been presented with Mandalas and have not thought to compare it to the US' form of art. Centralized composition was always avoided in my photography instruction as well as my general art instruction. My teacher claimed that it was bad composition and that there needed to be more happening in the picture. Even when I read comics, the characters would not be in the center of the frame, rather they would be off to one side or the other.

Neither character is in the middle of the frame. They are placed in the bottom left and right.