Barthes Essay

Well, the article entitled Rhetoric of the Image by Barthes was long but interesting. I was wondering how old it was. Anyone know? It also made me stretch my vocabulary-alot of big and complicated words. But it made me think about things in a way I haven't before. I've never thought about how meaning gets into an image-much less that they have linguistic messages, denotations, and connotations. It all makes sense, I've just never thought about it before.

We always here the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words", so I thought it was interesting when the article talked about how we are very much a civilization of writing-that we use images-but we almost always use words to bring meaning to those images (title/caption/article etc.). I noticed how true it was that the linguistic message serves as an anchorage to how we feel about an image. An example from my own life is some pictures my friend Steph just sent me-first I got the hard copies in the mail-then she emailed me some she had edited and added text to. When I got the photos in the mail, I thought they were okay, but the same images my friend sent me seemed so much better because she had stamped text like "Friends Forever" or "Timeless Fun in the Sun" on them. The photos with text seem so much more meaningful and sentimental, even though they are the same images as the originals.

Anyway, I found the comments about the difference between a drawing and a photograph a little confusing. How exactly does a drawing display its coding? And how is it so much different than a photo? I'm not talking about a little kid's drawing, but real artists can draw pictures that look just like photographs. So, how is the denotation of the drawing less pure than that of a photograph? Like the article says, a photo can be taken from different angles and distances, but a picture can be drawn from those same angles and distances. Maybe I missed the point of that section, but it just didn't make sense to me.

I thought the part of the article about how meanings of an image are seen through a cultural code (different lexicons) was pretty interesting and very true. For instance, the ad that Barthes mentions throughout the article is supposed to make you feel a certain way, but my grandma had a mesh bag just like the one in the picture that she would use to shop with and things were always falling through the holes and I would have to pick them up and hold them-so instead of feeling the Italianicity of the picture, I just felt annoyance as I envisioned the ingredients falling through the bag.

Well, that's all my main thoughts on the Barthes article. It was tough to read but I think it does a good job of analysing the Panzani ad and showing that there is a lot more to images than you may at first think.