Semiotics is the study of the social, cultural, and historical processes through which signs such as photographs acquire and circulate meaning. It is a useful critical approach with which to challenge simplistic beliefs in the realism of the photographic image; and as a critique of humanist and modernist concepts of artistic expression which place the photographer in a central position; where the work's success is measured against the author's intentions, and understanding these intentions means understanding the work. In this view, meaning is created by individuals and communicated using a transparent language. By contrast, a semiotic approach emphasizes how in all signs the relationship between signified (the meaning or content) and signifier (the form of the message) is arbitrary, based on social and cultural consensus; and how all meaning is context determined. Meaning does not pre-exist language, as the author's ideas or feelings, but is created by and through it. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who developed structural linguistics in the early 20th century, first proposed that meaning is generated by the difference between signs within a system, rather than by the correspondence between signs and a pre-existing reality. His ideas were then extended to the study of all types of sign systems, including visual ones, and refined by including psychoanalytical ideas and issues relating to reception. Barthes analysed how realist sign systems, such as photography, disguise their own conventionality by presenting themselves as natural. This ‘naturalness’ is then used by dominant cultural groups to make their own values and ideologies appear natural, thereby imposing them as ‘common sense’ on marginalized or disempowered groups. He also argued that the meaning of any given work is not fixed, but a process only temporarily arrested by the reader. Different contexts and audiences bring to a work a different network of intertextualities (references to, or knowledge of, other texts, images, and ideas) and thereby change its meaning. Other writers, such as Rosalind Krauss, have re-evaluated the early model of semiotics proposed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who categorized signs as iconic, indexical, or symbolic, as being more useful to understanding visual signs.
— Patrizia di Bello
See also contemporary art and photography; theories of photographic meaning.Bibliography
- Storey, J., An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (1993).
- Cartwright L., and Sturken, M., Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001)
