When interpreting a picture, the meaning attached to the picture is multi-layered and weak, so some people think that the image is a very primitive system compared to language, and other people think that meaning cannot explain the richness of the image. At this time, semiotics and visual analysis provide people with a potential unified conceptual framework, as well as a series of methods and terms used in various iconic practices, including packing, speech, photography, posture, etc. (Barthes and Heath, 2007). Visual analysis has successfully become a social method to help people extract meaning from images and use their expressions to understand existing life.
According to the practice and analysis of visual analysis by Barthes (1981), people can only understand and use visual analysis if people understand the real content in the image. To help understand it better, Barthes main focused on the concepts of operator, the spectator and spectrum (Barthes, 1981). The concept of these three different positions allows people to understand a work from different directions, it states the photograph is a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity, it transforms subject into object (p.10). At the same time, I think when people using visual analysis, since everyone’s understanding of the same work is different, people can get more subjective ideas and thus reflect people’s understanding of the society.
However, relatively speaking, the disadvantages of visual analysis are also very obvious. One of the biggest problems is that it is difficult to ensure that everyone understands the work fully and correctly, except for the subjective understanding of the photographer or creator. This is why most ads are marked with marginal titles and labels. For example, in the Panzani advertisement (Figure 1), in order for people to correctly understand the information it wants to convey, it has its own methods in choose color, text, object placement, and shooting methods (Barthes and Heath, 2007).
Compared to every clear step that people have when using discourse analysis, visual analysis does not give a clear method, or even a particularly clear definition of visual analysis. But this does not deny that visual analysis is not as convenient as discourse analysis. In fact, they are two different aspects. When analyzing a piece of news, for the text part, discourse analysis can sum up the main meanings it wants to express well and quickly, and it can give different social meanings by comparing different news content. When it comes to illustrations in the news, visual analysis can help people quickly give subjective ideas. The most important thing is that when the subjective idea of the picture and the text content of the summary are linked together, the most complete interpretation of a time really appears to everyone.
Reference
Barthes, R. and Heath, S. (2007). Image, music, text. New York: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.
By Yueying Xiang
MCS923 Group 5 