Content Analysis of Representation of Daily Subjects in Works of Contemporary Iranian Photographers with Emphasis on Paul Gee Method  

 
This study applies quantitative content analysis, and Paul Gee’s context analysis methods to analyze the representation of everyday life objects in works of Iranian contemporary photographers. In this respect, answering the question about meaningful differences in the choice of subject and the artistic styles in the works of male and female photographers seems necessary, through studying different characteristics of works of contemporary Iranian photographers.
Artists use everyday objects to arise artistic perception of the audience and inspire them to contemplate what seem to be ordinary. Whereas such art works represent an object, they challenge everyday subject to express artistic ideas and invite the audience to think.
This study investigates seven important linguistic actions and five activities in each art work provided in two different tables, in details.
What is derived as  result, is a meaningful and obvious difference in representation of objects in works of male and female photographers.  Photos of this study are selected through targeted sampling method.
Key words: Content Analysis, Context Analysis, Everyday Life Objects, Iran’s Photography.
 
One of the most important reasons that make everyday life a subject worthy of research is its ordinary nature. It was from the end of the 20th century that social theorists considered daily life as a dynamic and controversial subject. Since the beginning of the human consciousness and his approach to art, countless common objects and elements have been among the shaping factors of works of art. Especially photographers have emphasized their aesthetic aspect and importance in life by looking at and recording objects. In the photos where the objects are next to the portraits, you can understand the class and social position of the people.
The collection of photographs whose main subject is everyday life objects and tools, as well as dealing with the difference in the representation of everyday life objects in the works of contemporary Iranian male and female photographers, form the subject of this article. This representation of objects invites the audience to think and try to criticize the phenomena and normal affairs of everyday life. For this purpose, and better presentation of the concept of the article the works of the following contemporary Iranian artists have been studied: Shadi Qadirian (two collections), Mitra Tabrizian, Farshid Azarang, Mehran Mohajer, Neda Razavipour, Maitham Mahfouz and Behnam Sediqi.
This article uses the combined method of qualitative content analysis1 in order to describe the collections and analyze the text with an approach to Paul Gee’s discourse analysis method, which on the one hand expresses the constituent parts and components of the text and on the other hand expresses its internal actions.  The sources were collected through was field study and library research. The method of selecting works is based on targeted sampling among the works of male and female artists since 1991.
Content analysis is actually the classification of signs and the description of the explicit content of the message. It can be defined as a technique used to classify signs. Content analysis as a method recognizes and highlights the main points or axes of a text (or photo, video, etc.). In this method, the implicit content of the work needs to be examined as much as the obvious aspects. In this research, descriptive analysis is used to point out the frequency of specific topics and general theme analysis. This article has benefited from content analysis in the description of the collections and Paul Gee’s text analysis. According to Paul Gee, the analysis of the text is the analysis of the language used in the situation. In this research, language means the system of representing everyday life objects in the works of contemporary photographers. Paul Gee believes that the internal dialogue of the text shapes its conditional meanings and it is not possible to get out of it. As a result, the artistic text is able to create its conditional meanings through its internal language. According to Paul Gee, these texts have a kind of social praxis that creates identity. These texts create new actions and promote new policies.
In this research, with the help of Paul Gee's discourse analysis method, we will identify the linguistic actions that are performed in each of these functional parts of the language. In his two books, "Introduction to Discourse Analysis Theory 2005" and "Discourse Analysis: A Toolbox 2011", James Paul Gee has mentioned the method of discourse analysis, which believes that every linguistic text consists of "six parts". And according to the "seven linguistic actions" that the language performs, reality occurs. If in the analysis of a text (here we mean photography) we can identify these seven linguistic actions and the linguistic elements and relationships that make these actions practical, we can analyze the descriptive discourse of a text.
What this study emphasizes on is not the descriptive attention of the existence of objects, but it is a door to confronting and contemplating the objects, which leads to reflection on everyday life and to the explanation of the difference in the representation of everyday life objects in the works of contemporary Iranian male and female photographers.
In contemporary art, objects without human presence also have a meaning and have a special place. The beginning of the use of objects in art goes back to Marcel Duchamp who, by using the object itself and changing the title, changed the attitude towards matter and caused a revolution in the attitude towards everyday objects. Although this representation has been accompanied by ups and downs in the expression of the idea, the mere representation of it has not changed. For example, in the past, artists used objects for their representation and visual appeal, and in the modern era, this representation has led to a change in the artists' vision of the objects and phenomena of everyday life. In the era of new art, where the idea behind the representation of objects is to invite the audience to think and contemplate the artist's perspective, the objects of daily life have continued to be a constant in modern art. In photography, which is one of the branches of art, objects have always been the constant basis of images, either separately or next to people. In this article, an attempt has been made to examine the importance of objects in the works of male and female photographers and how they are represented.
This article deals with the representation of objects in the photographs of contemporary Iranian artists, and by studying the characteristics of the artists' works and how they deal with the subject, it aims to answer the question of whether there is a difference between the representations of everyday objects in the photographs of male and female artists. In most of the photographs taken by female artists of objects, they are represented next to women; while in the works of male artists, objects have an independent identity and only the physical and commodity aspect of the object itself, has significance. In photographing objects, women seek to give importance to women's identity and assert lost social rights. A work of art is an object that has emerged from the artist's perspective on world affairs. What has turned the everyday object into a work of art in these works is its separation from the context of everyday life. Through art (here, photography), objects are separated from their everyday functions and become objects to be seen. It is their separation from their usual context that gives them an appearance and makes them worth seeing. In this type of looking beyond reality, the value of objects and materiality is revealed and they can be separated from their empirical dimension through observation and reflection, and can be considered art. In Art as Device, Shklovsky claims: “there is a difference between everyday objects and artistic objects because there is no insight in everyday objects and we experience them unconsciously." In fact, by emphasizing everyday objects and highlighting them, these works play an important and fundamental role in creating meaning and turning them into a work of art.