Binary Oppositions

To touch on binary oppositions we would consider the examples such as man/woman, black/white, masculine/feminine, culture/nature, and so forth. These are considered categories of difference and are used to produced organized meaning especially in photographs among all other things in the world. The words reflect the opposite of the other one. For instance, if we take masculine we generally know what the opposite of it is....feminine. Binary oppositions are are reductive ways of viewing the complexity of difference.
Binary oppositions are also opposite in the way of "normal" and "abnormal" in so many words. The category of the norm is actually always set up in opposition to that which is deemed abnormal in some way hence the other one. The first category is considered unmarked or the norm while the other considered marked or other. To picture this in our mind, something that is unmarked would be something normal, not different or something that stands out, if something is marked, it clearly stands out or is different.
One thing we must be able to do when thinking of binary opposition is to understand the difference in the terms. When we see a photograph for example, or advertisements, we take the image in and try to make sense of its surroundings. In contemporary advertising both norms and otherness is highly evident. Thus taking the difference between Western and Eastern cultures and the terms Occidental and Oriental. Orientalism is the tendencies of the westerners who have fetishized, mythologized, and feared the cultures, lands, and people of Asia and the middle east. It is the way we have seen things through which we have been exposed to that secret world but not knowing unless we have been there.
In the painting The Bath, by Jean-Leon Gerome, binary opposition is very prominent. The difference in race, culture, position and so on is a good example of the term. The fact that fetish and exotic both show in this painting as well as the normal and abnormal we generally can make out the difference. There is a lot more that goes along with binary oppositions and how we see them. Photographs, paintings and advertisements usually are done with some kind of binary oppositions we can point out although we may never get it and may only just be focusing on what the advertisement or picture has to offer.