Roland Barthes. Image, Music, Text. "The Photographic Message."
Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 15-31.
In this essay, Barthes sees the newspaper as "a complex of concurrent messages
with the photograph as centre and surrounds constituted by the text, the
title, the caption, the lay-out and...by the very name of the paper" (15).
He separates the totality of the representation into two structures--the
visual and the textual--which are "contiguous but not 'homogenized'" (16),
and, laying the question of textual signification to the side, focuses
on elaborating "a structural analysis of the photographic message" (16)
and then on projecting some methods whereby the photographic image and
attendant text relate. The photograph, according to Barthes, "transmit[s]...the
scene itself, the literal reality" (17); that is, it provides a "perfect
analogon" of the object represented. This direct representation (the "what
it is") is the photograph's "denoted" message. In addition, a photograph
also conveys "a connoted message, which is the manner in which the
society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it" (17, italics
in original). (Paintings or other, more 'worked,' visual forms, on the
other hand, have a second-order meaning which is the denoted or representational
(first-order) meaning supplemented by the second-order style or 'treatment'
of the image.) Barthes lays out six "connotation procedures" or processes
whereby a photograph takes on a connoted meaning. These are: trick effects,
pose, objects which index certain things, photogenia, aestheticism, and
syntax, where photographs exist in a series. Connotation is historical
or social in the sense that how an image is connoted is entirely dependent
on the conventions and expectations of the society within which that image
appears. In his example, an image of fire will connote very differently
in a culture in which predominates a belief in hell as an actual, physical
place from one in which no such belief exists. In his discussion of the
interrelation between text and image, Barthes lays out two paradigmatic
forms of interaction: in the first, the "image illustrate[s] the text"
and in the second, "the texts loads the image, burdening it with a culture,
a moral, an imagination" (26). In fact, he states, since words can't "'duplicate'
the image," there is a new space of signification created "in the movement
from one structure to the other [where] secondary signifieds are inevitably
developed" (26). (Laurie Dickinson.)
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Annotated Bibliography.
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Michael Hancher
Department of English, University of Minnesota
URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibld3.html
Comments to: mh@umn.edu
Created 21 May 1995
Last revised 17 September 1996
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