The first time i read this essay i was left feeling very confused. Barthes originally wrote this essay in French having been translated into English I found that some of it did not make sense. I also found the language he uses quite complex. But after reading it through for a second time i found it easier to make sense of.
In this essay Barthes mainly looks at how images can have more than one meaning (polysemy) and that these can be interpreted by looking at a number of different aspects of the visual language. Barthes also focuses a lot on advertisement, and by looking at three different aspects of a message, it can be broken down further. He then goes on to talk about the 'linguistic message' which is a written message which can often be in the form of a caption, this is used to stop people asking the obvious. Whilst making notes i tried to relate it to my discipline to make it easier to understand. For example when he talks about how photographs can convey literal information. A photograph portrays 'Spectatorial Consciousness' whereas a film portrays 'fictional consciousness.' He then mentions the use of lexical which is the relating of the words of a language. I feel that this very much relates to my own discipline as it is important to use a visual language and to practise and build on these skills throughout your work. Barthes also mentions Cultural Associations, which I could easily relate to my cultures project, as this can be explored through textiles in many different ways. I then carried out my experiment which really helped my understanding of polysemy.
For the first part of the experiment we had to randomly select three images from a website and then ask a selection of people to look at the images and to say what they thought was going on in them. The outcome should be that they would come up with a story that links all three images. We then had to choose a story then add a fourth image and show a different selection of people the photographs and see if they came up with a similar story to that we had chosen.
Steve-29
You are born, you graduate and
then you have a family
Tom-35
Life cycle of an intelligent person
Graeme-25
Life of an average Joe, grows
up and then joins the rat race like
everybody else.
Kirsty-49
Little boy achieves his childhood
dream of becoming a professional
and last piece of the puzzle is to
have a family.
Gillian-17
Young boy looking into his future,
becomes a young professional and is
deciding on what the last piece of his
puzzle will be.
Target story-
Little boy achieves his childhood
dream of becoming a professional
and last piece of the puzzle is to
have a family.
We then had to add a fourth image to
see if people came up with a similar story
to the one we had chosen.
Ruth-22
Boy grows up gets dream job
and has a family.
Ben-26
The image of a perfect life
Alana-25
Young professional guy grows
up and has a family.
Dean-30
Puzzle is his life, nearly complete
last piece is to get married and have
children.
Our final task was to add a word to each of the photographs. I found even before I added the text to the images, the answers I got were very similar to my target story. By adding the text it relates back to what Barthes mentioned when he talks about how text is used so that people understand the obvious.
I found this experiment really interesting and enjoyed hearing people come up with lots of different stories for my chosen images. Having finished the experiment and written up my results i re-read the essay. I would definitely say that my experiment was a success and agreed with Barthes theory. I also found my understanding of polysemy and the essay as a whole after carrying out the experiment was much improved.
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