In the book Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes interprets images base on ontology approaches, in which he asserts that photographs separate consciousness from the substance and transforms subject to object. To further explain that, Barthes introduces three concepts:
– the operator (the photographer)
– the spectator (ourselves)
– the spectrum (any eidolon emitted by the object) (9)
They are actually three dimensions to understand a photograph, for example, from the operator’s perspective, he is using a silent way to “speak out”, so the emotion, belief, status of him, the environment around him, and the historic period he was in…all of these things are able to be considered as additional conditions when we try to understand the photograph. But the fact is, everyone might interpret one picture from a different way, as people usually tend to understand a new thing through the most familiar way, or say, based on their own experience. This is perhaps the charm of many famous paintings, as everyone, every era can interpret the masterpieces differently by their own sense of agency. But this, in turn, reveals the most obvious shortcomings of visual analysis. The variety and flexibility of explanation will often reduce the accuracy of the interpretation. And it has led to the vague conception of visual analysis.
We therefore can see some people believe that compared with language and texts, image is a rudimentary system, while others consider that signification cannot exhaust the image’s richness(Barthes, 1999). Different from discourse analysis, visual analysis is a semiotic approach which usually includes a series of discontinuous signs. The clues that images give can be seen from two levels: denotational signs (what is actually shown in the image) and connotational signs (the associational meanings). In most cases, the meaning behind the apparent codes is the key point to understand the image. So for the audience, the question like “what you think you see” and “what does not be shown” is more important than “what you see” and “what has been shown”.
Reference:
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, R (1999) Rhetoric of the image, Visual culture: the reader. (pp. 33-40)
By Anqi Weng
MCS923 Group 5 