Letting people ascribe their own identities cannot settle all of these questions when how we are seen and interpreted by others can still have such devastating effects, and even affect how we see ourselves.
Or to put it another way, Gaitonde envisions form perpetually forming and unforming, so that his paintings signify not what is seen and interpreted, but rather the act of seeing and interpreting.
The ANC's secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, asked members to be circumspect in singing liberation songs with words that "can be seen and be interpreted to be contributing to a racial polarisation of society".
The essence of this criticism is that the approach is too descriptive and failing to come up with any detailed suggestions of how actors should be seen, and their actions analysed and interpreted [ 21, 26, 54, 55].
Drawing from the multiplicity of what can be seen and how it might be interpreted by others that arises from this entreaty becomes a central source of dialogic provocation and wonder in this view.
More importantly, those interpretations are not mere window dressings for the researchers authoritative gaze, but play a vital role in influencing what might be seen and how it could be interpreted otherwise.
But once you've assessed the relative entertainment value of each performance, they all start to function as nuanced full-fledged portraits: lives made partly visible in imposing moving images on the wall, there to be seen, watched and interpreted through the filter of our own lives and bodies.
Lurking behind this prisoner's complicated smile, it seems, is an awareness that this image of his face will be widely seen and interpreted.
This method does not aim at generalizability but rather shows how some phenomena are seen, emphasized and interpreted by the participants [ 39].
