"The press photograph is a message" is the first sentence in the Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag.
- Discusses channels of communication (newspapers, the press, editorials)
All "imitative" arts are compromise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.
- Objectivity
-By a stock of stereotypes (schemes, colours, graphisms, gestures, expressions, arrangements of elements) we can understand the symbolic order and rhetoric transmitted through the image's connotations.
Barthes is saying the photographic message is broken up into ____ key points for the viewer to denote.
1. Trick Effects - The photograph has been faked... the mythological interest of trick effects os that they intervene without warning in the plane of denotation; they utilise the special credibility of the photograph. (especially when combined with graphic design an image can be perceived in a different way; even raise questions about the visual they are seeing)
2. Pose - How the subject is positioned, e.g.: hands joined together and eyes looking upwards has religious connotations. The existence of the stereotype form ready-made elements of significance. Historical connotations and links can be raised to signify meanings. "The message in the present instance is not 'the pose' but 'Kennedy praying': the reader receives a simple denotation what is in actual fact a double structure- denoted-connoted" (p. 201)
3. Objects - posing of objects, significance of objects, connotations which objects have with a personality or familiar character. An image and the placement of everything tells a story via the mise en scene of the scene; it is immersive and frozen in time. In addition, objects don't necessarily possess power but they possess meaning. Intertextual references can also impact the meaning of an object via symbolic signifiers.
4. Photogenia - (original theory of photogenia by Edgar Morin in Le Cinema ou l'homie imaginaire). Sontag does not discuss photogenia yet raises it as a point of reference for her point. In photogenia the connoted message is the image itself, yet in the modern day we have the ability to embellish the image with lighting, photoshop and printing techniques. 'There is never art but always meaning' (p. 203)
5.) Aestheticism - Sontag references paintings and the use of traditional compositional techniques used in them to create aesthetic harmony, she discusses how a photograph cannot replicate the intended beauty of a work of "art", yet photographers like Cartier-Bresson can construct their images in a similar way.
6.) Syntax - Several photographs coming together to form a sequence (commonly the case in illustrated magazines) where
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