The association of visual perception and visual interpretation is linked with social and cultural influences (Eco, 1985; Minh-ha, 1989; Willis, 1994; Collins, 1990; Harris, 2003), which are manifest through mnemonic devices and oral modes of communication (Lanker, 1989; Yates, 1992; Etter-Lewis, 1993; Carruthers, 1998). These cultural influences in turn offer culturally-toned terminology which with to speak about images and representation (Jakobson, 1971/1996; Christian, 1983/1985; Fischer, 1986; Minh-ha, 1990; Spillers, 2003), and to reclaim and re-appropriate those representations (Mercer, 1991; Fusco, 1995; Royster and Hammonds, 1995; Willis and Williams, 2002). The perspectives from these analytical viewpoints reveal what Minh-ha (1990) suggests is the duality and anxiety of the insider-outsider, one who “looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside” (145), when using generic imagery to represent complex representation. The individual's choice of which linguistic and visual terministic screen to use when interrogating images is complicated by their cultural beliefs and values, and consequently impacts visual comprehension and subsequent interpretation.

Bourdieu (1984) also argues that an individual's judgment of taste is not free from any external, influential factors. Values of culture are constructed as the reflection of an individual's social sphere. These constructed values constitute cultural capital, educational capital, and social capital, where cultural capital is influenced and mediated by educational and social capital. This idea of cultural capital is pivitol to what Bourdieu argues as serving to reinforce class habitas, “the internalized form of class condition” (101), as a system of classificatory schemes. He contends that these classificatory schemes function “below the level of consciousness and language, beyond...scrutiny” (466). Akin to Arnheim’s contention that abstract, generalized images could be representative of meaningful, physical manifestations, Bourdieu argues that social class habits are those orienting practices which reflect the individual's automatic gestures and “techniques of the body” (466). Thus, acceptance of and interpretation of visual images can argued as developing along group norms rather than individual reactions. Bourdieu asserts that “the classification systems which fix [the social classes] are not so much means of knowledge as means of power” (477). I argue here that the dominant culture’s political and thus social power is the terministic screen used to interpret and classify images and representations. While the cultural capital or class habitas of the dominant culture undeniably influences how images are interrogated, by also naming the parameters used to represent and interpret those images, the dominant culture ensures that those interrogations remain undisputed.

The effort of African Americans to challenge the dominant culture’s representations from an individual, personal experience becomes interpreted as one speaking for the entire community. This opposition perpetuates the ideas and notions of stereotypes, and homogenizes community members to a “sameness.” Even so, Fusco (1995) remarks that “collective memories... once activated, become power sites of cultural resistance” (36). She argues that the visual and economic appropriation of minority ethnic cultural artifacts, symbols, and signs by the dominant, Euro-American culture, become aesthetic or commodified artifacts for the dominant culture's entertainment. Fusco contends that cultural identity and values become charged issues for people who historically have not been able to define and control their visual representations. Thus, in order to claim and re-appropriate their culture, ethnic minority communities see “symbolic representation as a key site of political struggle” (31). This battleground reflects not only the right of ethnic minorities to determine the meaning of their culture, but also to take cultural representations imposed by the dominant culture and imbue the “icons, objects, and symbols” (35) with a different set of meanings. Here, I aruge, is where the photographic or print image becomes a complex representation bolstered with the need to infuse reality or a constructed view of reality with cultural-specific overtones. On the other hand, the influence of cinema in imposing identity construction through visual representation is more thorough due to its insidious nature. The cinematic gaze presents the added dimension of action as a complication of visual representation.