Week 2 Session: Decoding the advertisement
A visual semiotics workshop on refrigerator advertising, 1950–1980 — who is operating the fridge, and what is the white enamel saying?
3 March 2027 · Module 1 — Disenchantment
This week’s question: what is a refrigerator advertisement actually selling, if it is not selling refrigeration?
Inherited from week 1: cold became a purchasable commodity. This week is about how it was sold, and to whom.
Before the session
Read the Cowan excerpts.
Then find two refrigerator advertisements from between 1950 and 1980 — print advertisements work best, and archives of mid-century magazine advertising are easy to search online. Bring them, on a screen or printed. Try to find one from each end of that range; the change across thirty years is part of the material.
In the session
Groups of four. Each group works with a pooled set of six to eight advertisements.
- First pass — description only (20 min). No interpretation yet. What is literally depicted? Who is in the frame? Where are they standing, what are they wearing, what is their posture, who is looking at whom?
- Second pass — the implicit messages (35 min). Now interpret, systematically:
- Who operates the appliance? Whose hand is on the door?
- Who benefits? Who is depicted eating, resting, or being served?
- Colour and form. White enamel, chrome, rounded corners. What is white doing — purity, hygiene, clinical authority, middle-class arrival?
- Scale and placement. How big is the fridge relative to the person, and where is it in the room?
- What is promised that is not food? Status, modernity, marriage, leisure, being a good mother.
- The liberation claim (25 min). Cowan’s argument against the room’s findings. The advertisements promise freedom from labour; the time-use data says the hours did not fall. Where in the advertisement is the work that is about to be created rather than removed?
- Close (10 min). One sentence per group: what your set was really selling.
Afterwards
Keep your annotated advertisements. An advertisement is one of the strongest possible phenomena for the Critical Essay — it is small, dateable, and densely coded, which is exactly what that assessment wants instead of a broad topic.
Next week the fridge stops being a domestic object and becomes the end of a supply chain.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- your group has analysed at least three advertisements across at least two decades
- you have identified who is depicted operating the appliance, and who is depicted enjoying it
- you can name one thing the advertisement promises that is not about food
Teaching team
- Dr Simone Ravel — convenor