This essay will define, explain and examine the concepts of discourse and deconstruction respectively and will attempt to evaluate, compare, and contrast both terms. Discourse is a simple yet straightforward method of analysis whereas Deconstruction is a more cryptic and controversial method. The examples that will be referred to when putting discourse and deconstruction into practice are: an image from an exhibition at The Baltic called They used to call it the moon and a poster from the World War I collection at the Discovery Museum. The term discourse analysis refers to the act of analysing a certain media text through understanding the decoded messages incorporated within it. Indeed, it could also involve questioning authority, power and written, spoken or visual texts. Discourses could be defined as the ideas that establish varied ways in which one could view the world and understand certain issues (Wodak and Meyer, 2009). Similarly, according to Jackson (2006), the way one acts and carries oneself is constituted of binaries. Through discourse analysis, these binaries could then be made obvious and subsequently understood. Michel Foucault (1973), a renowned philosopher in the field of discourse, once stated that People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does in a well-known book that he wrote called Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. He believes that discourses generate potential possibilities towards the understanding of a certain media text. He justifies this statement by saying that they are actually practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak (Foucault, 1972:49). Furthermore, the term discourse itself refers to the way in which one is able to know about a certain issue and is able to understand what one is and is not able to talk about. Having established the definition of discourse in the above paragraph, it could now be put into practice. One of this essays specifications is to apply discourse analysis to a certain text and I chose a picture from an exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead which is called They used to call it the moon. This image (as shown to the left-hand side of the page) will be referred to for the discourse analysis part of the essay. By looking at this image, it could be seen that that is in fact a picture of an astronaut on the moon with a cut out image of a head, replacing the head of that astronaut. It could also be understood that the image of the replaced head is a constructed image of Jesus due to the headband of thorns around his head which he was wearing during his crucifixion. Another concept that helped me justify that it was somehow related to religion (The Christian faith in particular) would be the images in and around the same area of the exhibition as they all seemed to convey some aspects of the Christian faith like the image of the Virgin Mary with Jesus portrayed as a baby and images of other religious figures with halos around their heads. In additi