Photography's Mythic Objectivity

Panzani Advertisement from Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image.

 

Notes on Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image:

How images contain signifiers beyond pure representation.

 

Signs within the image (disregarding text)…

1) Narrative created by bag spilling onto ‘table’.

2) The colors of Italian flag create Italianocity.

3) Still Life genre…items are composed.

The photograph is a ‘message without a code’ so these signifiers are subjective.

 

Linguistic messages…

1) Brand name Panzani creates Italianocity. (repeated on carefully placed labels).

2) Most of the text here is simply the word associated with the depicted.

3) “A L’ITALIENNE DE LUXE” ...convenience with prestige? Truth?

The denoted message supports the connotated message.

 

Is an image always accompanied by a linguistic message…title, caption, text, dialog? What about image classifications that anchor images…found, random, surveillance, etc?

 

Although a photograph is a message without a code a drawing is a coded message, with it's visual abstraction guided by conventions of contour, linework, shading, perspective, etc.

 

Nature seems to spontaneously produce the scene in a photograph…masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

 

Rhetoric of the image…how are the signified of connotation to be named? (Italianocity)

“…the discontinuous world of symbols plagues the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence.”

Disclaimer; This is a mash-up of my notes from this essay and may not reflect the author's intent.