Male abstract readings and female specific readingsFocused audience groups from some Iranian photos

The audience's perception of the work is the culmination of the contact's interaction in the art system in which the audience achieves its understanding by assessing the work. Before the process of interpretation, the paraphrasing of the work, readings are made: Reading means the discovery of hidden message effects. In an attempt to construct a coherent concept of the work, the audience chooses elements of the work and organizes in a coherent whole such as presenting the narrative of the work. Audiences have different receipts in dealing with artwork. The initial assumptions in the perception of the work create a framework in which the next contents are interpreted. It's interpretation lead to the perception and understanding of the work. Past experiences of the audience, level of education, and gender are effective in reading works. The act of perception always begins with the prior knowledge and we associate new thing with what we already knew. Accordingly, the research hypothesis is that the male have abstract approach and female have a concrete approach photo reading. In this paper, with the abstract/concrete reading, and at a level beyond the interpretive / paraphrasing discourse, the exposure of the audience with selected photographs from NioshaTavakolian, GoharDashti, Ehsan Bagheri and Creative Photography Magazine have been investigated. By examining variables such as gender and education in reading and interpreting the audience from the photo, one can differentiate their views into two levels of interpretive (abstract) reading and paraphrasing (concrete) reading. Since among different arts, photographs have become more popular among the general public than visual media, and it has been used as a measure of research variables. The research method is qualitative and is used to study and categorize readings using the focused interview and gender approach. First, the concepts of reading, interpretation, paraphrasing, and narration as readings are discussed, and then the differences between the views of female and male and their relation to the readings and narratives of the photo are referred to, and finally, the narratives are separated which obtained from Focused Interview. Considering that in the Iranian society, women and men have different living experiences, so their views and way of dealing with phenomena such as pictures are different. Education is also effective in interpreting and paraphrasing audiences. Women use readings more than men to interpret and paraphrase. Women and men used different tools and narratives. Women initially start with emotional words and phrases, such as addressing the subject's feelings of a photo, explaining the meaning of photographs in the form of emotional descriptions and even after finding meaning, in most cases, in order to better understand the narrative of the photo with the focus of emotional criteria, they use abstract concepts, in such a way, these emotional descriptions confirm their abstract descriptions. In contrast, the men, in the face of a photo, they first seek to discover the distinct symbols and semantic codes that appear in the external photo and then by creating the rational ratios between them, they try to discover the meaning and interpretation of the photo.