Visual culture and visual language

The terms visual culture and visual language have been confusing me lately.  I wasn't entirely sure what precisely is meant by either term.  Although I'm sure my understanding of both will deepen over time, and following a fantastic conversation that took place over a day or so on Facebook in response to a post I made about Sebastião Salgado in a private group for Level 1 students, I do feel a little clearer about them.   I was so pleased that my post prompted such a decent chat about Salgado's work.  But I was even happier that I was able to ask questions which made me think about what a visual language actually is.  I wish such discussions were built into the course.  It's so helpful and really allows people to learn from others, think about things and also deepen their understanding too. It's a very tricky thing to do on FB or social networking - conversing without any knowledge of each-other and without the less than conscious signals and signs that we communicate with in person; it can feel dangerous and also lack a great deal of clarity at times but it is worth it.

I have also joined a Flickr group that meets up now and again which I hope will be useful.

The discussion on FB centred around the question about whether Sebastião Salgado's work warranted the following accusation taken from the end of a blog post by Jose Navarro on the OCA site which another student, Nigel Monkton had pointed me towards:

"Salgado seems to ignore the complexity of contemporary visual language. In today’s visual-led society, that’s more than just a little reckless."

I have to say I couldn't work out what the writer meant by this at all.  After lots of input by the end I think he (and Nigel) are saying that the Salgado's work has some very out dated characteristics. In the end I asked Nigel:

"are you saying his work is old fashioned and the styling a bit like a scene from a Busby Berkley musical - famous for geometric choreography - which seems out-dated, twee, condescending, romanticised and imperialistic? Which if that were the case would indeed be 'reckless' as described in the OCA post?"

I’m not sure where I stand on Salgado but in the end the conversation wasn’t so much about him for me as it was about how we look at images and what we, and others, might take from them.  I have become much more aware of the complexity of images although I feel far from being able to express myself further on this at the moment.

What I do know is that I do not want to over intellectualise my own work – not saying I want to dumb it down rather that I would hope that it comes from a more instinctive place than intellect alone.  I was always accused of over intellectualising my work as an actor (or trying to anyway) and not responding more intuitively and I would very much want to be able to do that with photography – so I’m a bit worried about how all this thinking and understanding might affect what I’ve been doing so far!

The language that different groups use - actors, therapists, doctors, teachers and photography students can sometimes seem impenetrable even though the words themselves are familiar and it can take some time to fully appreciate what is being said when you're new to it.  I'm very aware of this and think I need to really make sure I don't gloss over things when I've not fully comprehended what I'm reading/hearing.