Response to "Practices of Looking"

As a discipline of the arts, photography has always appealed to me as compared to other disciplines because of its ability to capture events, people or objects in their natural, unaltered state; a quality known as photographic truth. However, this "truth" can be very subjective. The photographer has the power to choose what he wants to incorporate into the frame, which in turn can drastically change the message being conveyed. In addition to this, a photographer must always be aware of the public that will be receiving the photograph. In this excerpt from "Practices of Looking", the argument is made that dissimilar individuals will create different meaning of a photo as a result of their own as well as collective cultural ideologies.

In this manner, a photograph has two aspects: the denotative, which concerns itself with the literal description of an image, and the connotative, which refers to the meaning that arises from cultural and historical contexts. To illustrate this concept, look at the photo below:
One might venture to say that this is a photo of a elderly man crying as he hugs a young woman (denotative). However, there are others that could attest for the fact that this is a photo of a father dancing with his daughter at her wedding. The photo itself hints at this (i.e. the white dress), but someone who shares this experience would be more apt to connect the dots than someone who has no concept of marriage (I will bargain to say) as it relates to Western society. Barthe's model breaks it down into the following model:

Image/ sound/ word ---> Signifier

------------------------------------------------> Sign

Meaning ---> Signified

In this case, the Signifier could be the man and the Signified could be father. Or Signifier = embrace, Signified = last dance. There are many possibilities! This goes to show that the old misconception that anyone can be a photographer is actually very inaccurate. A good photographer must be cognizant of all these aspects in order to use his medium, the photograph, effectively to communicate with the people. There is an underlying language of photography, hence the name of this course. Knowing what we know now, it is interesting to wonder just how much takes place on a subconscious level in our everyday lives. We live in a very visual culture in which we are bombarded with tons of images daily. Think about the last product that you bought, how much of that was due in part to an ad?