Photography's Mythic Objectivity

Panzani Advertisement from Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image.

 

Notes on Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image:

 Linguistic message within image;

    Denoted; What text is there?
    Connoted; What symbolism is there in the presentation of text?

Literal messages;

    Representations of specific things in the image. 

  Accompanied linguistic messages to the image;

    Anchor; What exactly am I looking at? (do these elements create a narrative?)
    Relay; What should I think when I see this? (functionality/meaning)

  Symbolic messages;

    Cultural implications of specific objects represented. (bag, ingredients)
    Cultural implications of juxtapositions. (symbolic color, cuisine, implied actions)
    Cultural implications of image classifications. (still life)

 Denoted message;

    Does the photograph exist as a trace of, or an equivalent of truth? How much truth?
    Is the photograph always a lie? Are there obvious deceptive elements?
    How can these ideas co-exist?

Connoted message;

   Our complete reading of the image/text. (We should want to eat this or we see we are being manipulated or both)


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

Sky Hopinka

This is a certain body
2019
Inkjet print, etching
13h x 13w in

Sky has made a huge impact on a little corner of the artworld over the last decade. The work is strongly content driven and considerably more poetic than narrative. Although working primarily in video his work meanders into whatever territory it needs to medium wise, with projects often combining many forms as listed in the Series of Work section of the artist's web site;

http://www.skyhopinka.com/

Also from the website is this bio;

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. 

Unlike most of us Sky can really do well as an interview subject;

https://www.pbs.org/video/native-filmmaker-1674509247/