Imagetelling on Edward Hopper's Paintings

Abstract

E. Hopper's paintings fascinate us focusing on strong colors, light, common places, and people’s gaze. This article dealing with his paintings is reviewed by W.J.T. Mitchell's picture theory. Mitchell analyses paintings under cultural relations and connected them to media, politic, history discourses. His abundant approaches of image give an important issue of imagetelling. As above, common places and people’s gaze are main elements on Hopper's paintings. Places represented nature and civilization encounters by light. Also people do not look at each other and look like being of self-alienation. To find out how the functions of his paintings are involved in imagetelling, this paper suggests stable images with informations quantity and remediated moving images. Even though modern society is definitely the age of image, image discourses are distributed in various areas. Therefore, imagetelling including the definition, status, functions of image and the method of perception and delivery, an interaction with consumers can be a humanistic discourse combining academic disciplines. This study explores imagetelling mainly regarding the functions and the method of delivery of image on Hopper's paintings.