The Photographic Message by Roland Barthes

Books by Roland Barthes

  • A Barthes Reader
  • Camera Lucida
  • Critical Essays
  • The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
  • Elements of Semiology
  • Image-Music-Text
  • A Lover's Discourse
  • Mythologies
  • New Critical Essays On Racine
  • The Pleasure of the Text
  • Roland Barthes
  • Sade/Fourier/Loyola
  • S/Z
  • Writing Degree Zero

The Photographic Message

  • The press photograph is a message formed by:
    • Source of Emission: Newspaper staff involved in taking, choosing, composing, titling, captioning, and commenting on the photo.
    • Channel of Transmission: The newspaper itself, including text, title, caption, layout, and the paper's name which influences the reading of the photograph.
    • Point of Reception: The public reading the paper.
  • The three parts of the message require different investigation methods:
    • Emission and reception fall within sociology, studying human groups, motives, and attitudes in relation to the social totality.
    • The message itself requires immanent analysis of the photograph's unique structure, independent of its use but before sociological analysis.
  • The photograph's structure is not isolated; it communicates with the accompanying text (title, caption, article).
  • Information is conveyed through two separate but cooperative structures: linguistic (text) and non-linguistic (photograph).
  • The text uses words, while the photograph uses lines, surfaces, and shades.
  • Analysis should first focus on each structure separately before understanding how they complement each other.
  • Much is known about language structure, but little about photograph structure.

The Photographic Paradox

  • The content of the photographic message is the literal reality of the scene itself.
  • Moving from reality to photograph involves reduction in proportion, perspective, and color, but no transformation into substantially different signs.
  • No code or relay is needed between the object and its image because the photograph is the object's perfect analogon.
  • Thus, the photograph is a message without a code, making it a continuous message.
  • Other analogical reproductions like drawings, paintings, cinema, and theater develop supplementary messages beyond their analogical content, known as the style of reproduction.
  • These comprise two messages:
    • Denoted message: The analogon itself.
    • Connoted message: The society's interpretation of the analogon, signified by the treatment of the image and referring to a certain culture.
  • In photography, particularly press photography, the first-order message fills its substance, leaving little room for a second-order message.
  • The photograph appears to be exclusively constituted and occupied by a denoted message, fully exhausting its mode of existence which creates a feeling of analogical plenitude.
  • Describing a photograph involves adding a second-order message derived from the code of language, creating a connotation that changes structures and signifies something different from what is shown.
  • The purely denotative status of the photograph is likely mythical.
  • The photographic message, especially in the press, is probably connoted.
  • Connotation is inferred from production and reception phenomena, such as professional, aesthetic, or ideological norms influencing the construction of the photograph.
  • The public reads the photograph and connects it to a traditional stock of signs, implying a code of connotation.
  • The photographic paradox is the coexistence of a message without a code and a message with a code, and ethically it questions how the photograph can be objective and invested, natural and cultural.
  • Understanding the imbrication of denoted and connoted messages is key to resolving this paradox.
  • Since the denoted message is analogical and continuous, there is no need to find signifying units of the first-order message.
  • The connoted message comprises a plane of expression and a plane of content, necessitating decipherment.

Connotation Procedures

  • Connotation is realized at different levels of the photograph's production (choice, technical treatment, framing, layout) and represents a coding of the photographic analogue.
  • Connotation procedures are not units of signification but can be translated into structural terms.

Trick Effects

  • Trick effects intervene without warning in the plane of denotation, using photography's credibility to pass off a heavily connoted message as merely denoted.
  • Signification is possible if there is a stock of signs and a code.
  • The code of connotation is historical rather than artificial or natural.

Pose

  • The pose of the subject prepares the reading of the signifieds of connotation and relies on stereotyped attitudes that form ready-made elements of signification.
  • A "historical grammar" of iconographic connotation should be based on painting, theater, associations of ideas, and stock metaphors.
  • Pose derives its effect from the analogical principle at the basis of the photograph.

Objects

  • The posing of objects derives meaning from the photographed objects themselves, which induce associations of ideas or act as symbols.
  • Objects are discontinuous and complete, referring to clear, familiar signifieds.
  • Objects can be composed to create a specific connotation.

Photogenia

  • Photogenia involves the connoted message being the image itself, embellished by techniques of lighting, exposure, and printing.
  • These techniques have corresponding signifieds of connotation that can be incorporated into a cultural lexicon of technical effects.
  • Differentiating aesthetic effects from signifying effects is an opportunity to establish if there is never art but always meaning in photography.

Aestheticism

  • Aestheticism in photography is ambiguous and can signify itself as "art" or impose a more complex signified.
  • The resulting photograph is not a painting but a display of aestheticism referring to the very idea of painting.

Syntax

  • Several photographs can come together to form a sequence.
  • The signifier of connotation is found at the suprasegmental level of the concatenation.
  • The sequence offers an effect of comedy emerging from the repetition and variation of attitudes.
  • A single photograph is rarely comic, as comedy requires movement, repetition, or typification.

Text and Image

  • The text constitutes a parasitic message designed to connote the image.
  • The image no longer illustrates the words; the words are parasitic on the image.
  • The image functions as an episodic return to denotation from a principal message (the text) which was experienced as connoted since, precisely, it needed an illustration; in the relationship that now holds, it is not the image which comes to elucidate or "realize" the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize, or rationalize the image.
  • The information appears founded on an objective (denoted) message in relation to which the text is only a kind of secondary vibration, almost without consequence.
  • Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination.
  • Formerly, there was reduction from text to image; today, there is amplification from the one to the other.
  • The connotation is now experienced only as the natural resonance of the fundamental denotation constituted by the photographic analogy and we are thus confronted with a typical process of naturalization of the cultural.
  • The closer the text is to the image, the less it seems to connote it and there are degrees of amalgamation.
  • The caption probably has a less obvious effect of connotation than the headline or accompanying article.
  • It is impossible for words to "duplicate" the image.
  • In the movement from one structure to the other second signifieds are inevitably developed which leads to a relationship of making explicit, of providing a stress.
  • The text amplifies connotations already in the photograph; it sometimes produces an entirely new signified which is retroactively projected into the image, so much so as to appear denoted there, and can even contradict the image to produce a compensatory connotation.

Photographic Insignificance

  • The code of connotation is historical/cultural and its signs are gestures, attitudes, expressions, colors, or effects endowed with certain meanings by virtue of the practice of a certain society.
  • Signification is the dialectical movement resolving the contradiction between cultural and natural man.
  • The reading of a photograph is always historical and depends on the reader's knowledge.
  • The photographic "language" is not unlike certain ideographic languages which mix analogical and specifying units, the difference being that the ideogram is experienced as a sign whereas the photographic "copy" is taken as the pure and simple denotation of reality.
  • The photograph may not contain "neutral" parts and the mechanisms of reading and perception need to be elucidated.
  • The photograph is verbalized in the very moment it is perceived and the image has no denoted state.
  • Connotation can be perceptive, cognitive (depending on knowledge of the world), and ideological/ethical (introducing reasons or values).
  • Political connotation is entrusted to the text and denotation is powerless to alter political opinions.
  • Pure denotation may only exist at the the level of traumatic images in which the trauma is a suspension of language and a blocking of meaning.
  • The more direct the trauma, the more difficult is connotation.
  • Photographic connotation is an institutional activity, integrating man and reassuring him.
  • Analyzing codes allows a historical definition of a society which shows how it ensures its peace of mind.
  • A paradox makes of an inert object a language and transforms the unculture of a "mechanical" art into the most social of institutions.