Sample Description: A current ad in the New Yorker magazine for Toyota features a two-page spread of children at play on toy cars on a country road. The half-dozen children are gathered around two cars, laughing and running.  On either side of the road are open fields colored gold and green in a soft late afternoon light.  A few trees dot the fields, and the impression is of a relaxed rural setting that may be part of a farm.  While a pack of girls runs alongside a boy a little way back on the road, another boy drives his car right toward the viewer and the edge of the photo.  This driver is smiling and looking straight ahead, and a boy right behind him looks excitedly at the driver’s face as he helps to push the car.  Both drivers of the cars wear sleek gray helmets. The caption below the photograph reads, “Can the car of the future create a better future?  Why not?” Small-sized drawings next to the caption show cars with special parts highlighted in red and with stars.  The captions beside these drawings read “Plug-in hybrid” and “Pre-crash safety.”

Sample analysis of cultural context for the same ad:  

Clearly, the Toyota advertisement plays on viewers’ anxieties about the destruction of the natural environment and its effect on future generations.  The idyllic scene represents the new green future we would like to give to our children. The fields are blurred a little as if to suggest a dreamy beauty as in a painting.  The light highlights the children’s faces and obvious excitement.  All of the children are wearing bright colors and are absorbed in play, unconcerned with what any adults around them may be doing. Only the driver in the foreground looks toward us, and he wears a trusting, optimistic, cute smile. The ad suggests that these are perfectly happy children who have been provided with a safe, nurturing, pleasurable environment to grow up in.

The ad’s caption connects these children at play to the idea of a “car of the future.” Toyota is building on its image as the maker of the Prius and representing itself not just as an environmental choice but as a visionary force.  Even though technology and cars in particular are often seem as enemies of nature, Toyota would like us to see its cars as allies of nature.  It suggests that in this company’s hands, technology can actually turn into a force that will protect nature and promote a bright and happy natural environment.

From an essay by Marianne Hirsch, “Reframing the human family”

An entirely different image also from the USA is Consuelo Kanaga’s best-known photograph... Photographed from a very low angle, it depicts a tall and very thin black woman standing in front of a white brick wall, resting one arm on a small boy at her right side while a little girl stands to her left. The three figures look not at each other but at the camera.  The woman is wearing a much-too-small sweater with two safety pins in front, and a scarf tied into a turban. The children are healthy-looking and cleanly though poorly dressed. Their looks are intent but not easily readable: the mother looks tired and resigned to a tough life, the children look confrontational, perhaps suspicious or curious, maybe intrigued by the large camera and the itinerant white woman who came into their community to take pictures. In spite of the protective gesture with which the mother holds the children close to her, there is not warmth or comfort in this picture, no domesticity or circularity. The three figures are more directly engaged with the intrusive photographer than with one another.