Iconography

Today you are going to be thinking about the iconography of your productions. Put simply, iconography is all about the most important symbols within your genre. If your genre was 'gardening magazines' for example, your iconography would involve lots of trees, soil, people with trowels pulling weeds out of the ground... etc.

Activity 1

Look at the five pictures above. They are all 'iconic' photographs which show men in a stereotypical way. In each case however, we have an entirely different stereotype. For each of these photographs, I want you to make the following labels in a word document:

1. What message does this photograph send out about men?

2. How does it send out this message?

3. What magazine or advert do you think could use this photograph?

Activity 2

Using picsearch, I want you to find 5 photographs that create different representations of women (one showing a woman as being highly intelligent, another showing a woman as being helpless, etc.).

For each of these five photographs I want you to write a brief description of how they portray women and where you think the photographs could be used.

Activity 3

I want you to make a list of the main 'icons' that you will have to include in your productions.

Example: If you are making a supermarket advertisement, your icons should be 'trolleys', 'checkouts', 'smiling employees in uniforms', 'the words "great value"', 'a shot of the sun shining over the super market', etc.