Week 3 BCM 110 blog post

This image off website https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/537527/word-for-a-single-picture-which-can-be-interpreted-in-two-different-ways shows a little girl sitting under a pair of trees, however it also shows the girl sitting in the skull. This image has many meanings, however my interpretation of this is that the girl is too innocent to realize the world around her of being unfair and cruel. My  other perception is that the girl has been eaten up by the skull and has already been familiarized with the dark truth about the world and that it is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Due to the vectors towards the girl the first thing readers will see is the girl however once taking a further look the readers will eventually see the outline of the skull. My first initial thought was that the girl being around the skull signifies her innocence. However after looking at it from another angle it could be the other way round where the girl has been engulfed by the skull and been exposed already losing her innocence in that being the world. This image can be seen by many different readers in different ways. Once again having a deeper look and thinking into this image we can see crows and apples within the skull and the girl. Crows being a symbol of death and the apples potentially a reference from snow white in that of it being poisonous as well as the skull could represent that the little girl has passed away. 

This Image has many Signifiers, denotations and connotations and ideologies. The signifiers in this image are of the little girls facial expressions, looking down at the ground with a sad sobby face may solidify to readers that their theory of her death or exposure to her cruel world may be true as if she was happy where she was she wouldn’t be looking down in a distraught fashion. The denotations and connotations in this image are the all fades of black picture. Black as a color has many representations, this may include positives such as mystery, power, elegance, and sophistication and negatives such as death, mourning, evil magic, and darkness once again this image through the use of denotations and connotations can portray different meanings. Ideologies include things such as political, social, epistemological, and ethical. Although the Image was made June 13th 2020 readers like myself may relate this to an ethical propaganda pitch from Ukraine due to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. An image like this can have a different meaning once again and may motivate people to fight back against Russia as this little girl may resonate with someone in their family and if they don’t fight back the fate of their children may be like the little girls.

On the images link^ users verify this complex image as an Ambiguous Image; these are forms which exploit graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the phenomenon of multistable perception. This verifies the thought that this complex image can have many different meanings for every reader.

Reference list

UNICHEF, October 2021, The state of the worlds children 2021

Bühler-Niederberger, D, April 28th 2017, Innocence and childhood

Mehta, V, April 4th 2019, Loss Of Childhood Innocence – Are We Pressurising Our Children Too Much?

Sicard, S, March 4th 2022, How Ukraine is winning the propaganda war

K. Strong Jr, E, Vol. 14, No. 3, Mar., 1922, Control of Propaganda as a Psychological Problem

Gooddall, H, March 10th 2022, Ukraine accuses Russia of bombing children’s hospital in Mariupol as invasion enters second week

Gjersoe, N, October 3rd 2016, Ambiguous figure illusions: do they offer a window on the mind?

Sterzer, P, Kleinschmidt, A, Rees, G, Volume 13, Issue 7, July 2009, Pages 310-318, The neural bases of multistable perception