Article:

Bilder lesen ...

»Bilder lessen«; the phrase reading pictures, meant altogether seriously by authors even to be taken seriously (e.g. Claude Gandelman: ›Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts‹, 1991), finds in the current aesthetic discourse increasingly use. Against this background shall, on the one hand, the essential features of that kind of foveal vision which may be aptly named reading be inquired and it will be examined to what extent the viewing of pictures can be referred to as such in a non-metaphoric sense. This question is, on the other hand, not independent from the query of the constitution of those formations of graphic signs which may establish ›reading materials‹. – Is reading perhaps the general mode of the reception of texts and therefore – if we follow the supporters of a potentially overstretched conception of text – of pictures as well? It shall be attempted to show that at least from an etymological point of view there is not that much to be said against conceiving even a picture as text; written texts, however, own, what’s more, though likewise presentational forms in the sense of Susanne Langer, a linear-discursive constitution.