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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Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibld3.html

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Created 21 May 1995

Last revised 17 September 1996