- Roland Barthes - French literary theorist, philosopher, writer and academic.
- His work explains how we can interpret and understand the meanings within photographs.
- The Photographic Message (1961)
- The Rhetoric of the Image (1964)
- Barthes proposed a way of ‘reading’ photographs using the existing theory of Semiotics.
- The term comes from the ancient Greek word semeion meaning “sign”.
- A way of analysing meanings by looking at the signs which communicate these meanings.
- The audience (readers) work between their experience and message itself to come to a understanding.
Charles S. Pierce (1839-1914)
- Symbolic, Iconic and Indexical signs
- Icon - Simplest sign since it is a pattern that physically resembles what it `stands for'.
- symbol - Doesn’t resemble what it refers to; it signifies through the force of convention (language). e.g. smoke is an index of fire.
- A sign is composed of a ‘signifier’ which is the form of which the sign takes and then the ‘signified’ which is the concept it represents.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
- A message - Is a singular, meaningful unit of which could be a picture or a piece of writing.
- A code - Is an abstraction created by the audience. The idea that comes with the message.
- Realism - makes a image appear ‘natural’ rather than socially and historically constructed.
- The photographic paradox is therefore the coexistence of two messages: the one without a code (the photographic analogue) and the one with a code (the ‘art’ or treatment of the subject, the rhetoric of the photograph).
- Denotation - What is literally in the photograph and communicate facts e.g large building.
- Connotation - What is suggetsed by the depiction of the viewer which are specific to culture/knowledge e.g. larger building = Buckingham Palace.
- Perceptive connotation - The image is verbalised the moment it is seen (similar to denotation because facts about what is in the actual image are perceived by the audience immediately).
- Cognitive connotation - Factual elements of the picture that are picked out or understood because of the audience’s knowledge.
- Ideological and ethical connotation - The elements in the photograph that create the strongest and most complex message.
Forms of Connotation in a Photograph
- Pose - Position of the figure which contains a message from culture, history, literature and painting.
- Objects - Signifiers and associate with culture. The arrangement and selection creates a connotation in the photograph.
- Aestheticism - Photographs which emulate paintings or other known images with composition.
- Trick effects - The disruption of the credibility of the photograph of reality by creating a false simulation.
- ‘Photogenia’ - Related to technology of photographic production like lighting, exposure and printing to create certain effects such as motion blur, double exposure etc to create connotations within the photograph.
- Text and Image can never be read as the same thing.
- Text can create a new set of signifiers to the image which you would never be able to see in the photograph.
The Rhetoric of the Image (1964)
- Refined initial analysis of photographic meaning that was in ‘The Photographic Meaning’
- This finalised analysis was later put in an essay titled ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ (1964)
- In ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ and future work, Barthes is concerned with the ‘hidden messages’ that comes with advertising.
- Text and Image come together to create meanings that are culturally created but seem ‘natural’ because they are so familiar.
Multiple Messages of Advertising
- The linguistic message - Words and text that comes with images.
- Non coded iconic message - The literal denotation of the picture.
- Coded iconic message - The connotation of the picture.
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