To look at an image, an advertising image, an advertising panel, a journal page or a magazine page, furniture, an object, a work of art etc.… Involves an analysis of the image’s sense. This analysis is in the heart of the process of processing various information and personal feelings that many philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists and semiologists have attempted to theorize and conceptualize during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was first a linguist. Inspired by Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) theories, he considered human language as a set of words. Each word consists of two inseparable elements: the "signifier" (acoustic image, sound) and the "signified" (the pure concept) which exists only in opposition to its opposite.
But he was also semiologist and analysed the image, the life of signs, within social life.
Roland Barthes borrowed the codes and concepts of the linguistic to analyse the images and their meaning in his work "Rhetoric of the image" (1964).
In the context of a commented text he analysed the signifying meaning of a sign or an image, but also the meaning induced or signified.

"Every image is polysemic, it implies, underlying its signifiers, a" floating chain "of signifieds whose reader can choose certain and ignore others” (Rhetoric of the image, P156).

• What does Rhetoric mean?

Rhetoric is the art of defining problems and finding solutions, the art of persuading through language. The word "rhetoric" comes from the Latin "rhetorica" itself derived from the word "rethorike" designating "oratory art". In ancient times, the Greeks used oratorical art as a technique of communication.
But in rhetoric, there is also a relation to the image.

Roland Barthes placed the science of language as a fundamental feature of society.
Taking also into consideration the texts of the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss (1908-2009), he studied the production of the society in regards to semiology and the implicit language of advertising.

• Does the image have its own language?

Images, whatever their type, have something to teach us. This visual message has its own language, with its own codes, and always has one or more functions: to communicate, to convince, to persuade, to criticize, etc.

We can also associate Barthes’s “Rhetoric of the image” with Erwin Panofsky and his book "Study of iconology" (1939).
Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), (German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime) considered that any object can be aesthetically perceived and viewed and that any work of art can be perceived as practical objects. The only difference between the object and the work of art is the intention that the work of art be aesthetically perceived by considering the environment of its production, symbols and signs which it contains and which translate an idea.
On the other hand, for Ferdinand de Saussure, the language was a set of signs composed of the "signified" which is the concept, the mental representation of a thing and the "signifier" which is the acoustic image of a word.

Finally, Charles Pierce, (American philosopher of the 19th century and considered as one of the founders of modern semiology) considered that "human is a sign" and that there is no thought without signs. He therefore created the "theory of meaning" which allows the signs to be interpreted. By giving meaning to his life through different symbolic universes, the human being accomplishes and surpasses his form of subject by becoming creator and interpreter of his signs and the signs that he discovers in the world.

In the 20th century, at the height of structuralism from the 50’s to 70’s in France, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and writers like Roland Barthes participated to the creation of a set of holistic currents of thought emerged mainly in the human and social sciences.
The common point of these ways of thinking is the rejection of the historical and temporal dimension and its formalism and the study of the history of scientific ideas and theories of knowledge over a long period.

In "Mythologies", Roland Barthes analysed the "myths" of his time and his sociocultural stereotypes.


• Let’s use his study concerning the Citroën DS by way of example :
He studied the advertising of a Citroën DS car produced in the 60's/70's.
According to his analysis, the car is both a practical object that allows to move, but also a quasi-divine edifice futuristic design to be compared to the Gothic cathedrals.
Besides their functional aspect, these car Citroën DS have a value that rests on their image and brand that stigmatizes a certain social level.

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” (The New Citroën, P88, Mythologies, 1980)






































“But the truth Barthes explored in "Mythologies" holds. Cars are more than machines. They are major cultural creations.” (Alex Davies, 2013, www.businessinsider.com)
• Let’s use another example with the Le Corbusier lounge chair LC4 (1928):

Brought out from Le Corbusier concept of “functional furniture”. Furniture, like dwellings, must be functional. All superfluous items are deleted. Decoration is removed, revealing stripped structures, large smooth surfaces and plain colours. The shape and beauty of the object derive from its function and the quality of the materials used.

Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret combined leather and steel in its development. These two materials perfectly reflect the current flow of thought at the time bringing together “Art” and “Industry”.
The alliance of leather and steel gives this timeless side which has made its success since its release at the autumn show in 1929.

Here the signifier is a lounge chair: a type of chair, a piece of furniture provided without a backrest and intended for a person to sit or lie down. For more than one person it is a sofa or a bench. But this lounge chair has a signified, it has a purpose: to sit or lie down, it has traditionally been associated with psychoanalysis and many psychoanalysts continue to keep long chairs in their offices for use in psychotherapy. And it has a style: Handmade from the finest materials, including hand-polished tubular Stainless Steel, organic Cowhide and matching Italian sourced leather.




























We can deduct by simple observation, that any object can be perceived as neutral but everything speaks of us.

Roland Barthes was also interested in fashion, as a language in its own right.
His book “Le Système de la mode” (1967) is based on the opposition of the elements that constitute it.
“Barthes is interested neither in clothing as artifact (clothing as made) nor in its figurative representations (iconic clothing), although those diverse subjects were part of the research program-too broad but more cautious on questions of linguistic analogy-proposed by the 1957 article.” (Nicole Pellegrin, fashion-history.lovetoknow.com)

Indeed, he indicated that this cardigan (ELLE Magazine, 1967) can be worn "sport": open collar, or as opposed "dressed": closed collar. The position of the neck does not transmit the same image, the same message to the others.

"The garment is one of those objects of communication, such as food, gestures, behaviors, conversation, which I have always had a deep joy to intercede, because on the one hand they have a daily existence, And represent for me a knowledge of myself at the most immediate level because I invest myself in my own life and because, on the other hand, they possess an intellectual existence and offer themselves to a systematic analysis by Formal means” (“Vingt mots clés pour Roland Barthes”, Le magazine Littéraire, 1975)

For Roland Barthes, fashion was a sign, fashion was a language.

In the same way, Barthes was interested in photography questioned its nature in his book "La Chambre Claire, 1980”, as opposed to the Black Room where the photographs are developed.
Through photography Barthes seeked to know what photography "is in itself".
He proceeded to a "wild" analysis, without culture, made of affect, of feelings of the looking subject and of the subject being looked at.

He described two elements of the photo that admire him:
- The studium: the taste for someone or something
- The punctum: a sting, a poignant detail conferring an external life on the image
It is the attraction you feel when looking at a photo that animates it.

He was totally thunderstruck by a photograph (1852) of Jerome Bonaparte Napoleon’s brother, and said to himself "His eyes saw the Emperor".

For Barthes, perceiving what it means was possible through reflection.
Photography is the medium which looks fixedly, it is charged with its very existence and with what it represents: “The object photographed has existed, it has been where I see it.” (La Chambre Claire, 1980, P177)

• Let’s examine one of world’s famous photograph : Guerrillero Heroico ("Heroic Guerrilla Fighter") :
Taken by Alberto Korda on March 6, 1960, during a parade of millions of people in Havana for the burial of the victims of the Coubre (attack attributed to the CIA which detonated a cargo French armed forces that Cuba had bought from Belgium, causing 80 deaths and 200 wounded).

This photograph is published in the pages of the journal “Revolucion” as part of a report on a conference by Ché Guevara in 1961. Entitled "Guerrillero Heroico", this shot does not know for the moment international success. A few years later, in 1967, Guevara was executed by the Bolivian army. The cliché then circumnavigates the world and symbolizes the sacred death of an inspired revolutionary.




















Here the signifier is a man, Ernesto Guevara, known as El Che, his hair in battle, his air determined and dark, looks towards the distance. Who has been executed at 39 years old.
The signified gathers all the virtues attributed to a “hero”: honesty, bravery, challenge, loyalty, pride, military manhood. This visage is the signified, it has become an ubiquitous symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture. Che Guevara's face expresses as much firmness (as opposed to the United States) as confidence (in the future of the revolution), negligence (beard, long hair in wind) and seriousness of engagement (the Commander’s star on his beret).






















A new impulse is given to the image when Jim Fitzpatrick, an Irish painter, takes up photography to stylize it in 1968.

Here everything has a meaning: the red background, it is Revolution. The beret is the armed struggle. The beard and hair is the Guerillero. The face is beautiful and grave; it symbolizes youth loving freedom and justice.
To conclude, the images induce: adhesion, repulsion, passion, indifference, consumption, etc.
No image analysis will allow to apprehend an image in a complete and definitive way.
Seeing an image involves trying to: watch, observe, take into consideration its affects, believe, discover, understand, in order to define its signifying and signified meaning.

• In his painting "The treachery of images" (1928-1929) René Magritte painted a very realistic pipe:




















He said however on the canvas "This is not a pipe". The principle put forward by Magritte is that the image is not the reality. He put into practice Descartes’s “Theory of the doubt” and Gervereau’s “Principle of uncertainty”.

A sign, an image, is always double.

Here the signifier is the pipe painted in the most realistic way possible. Since the pipe is painted on a canvas, it is not a pipe that one can smoke, it is only the image of a pipe, this is the signified.
The reflection and the imagination of the spectator are mobilized to allow him to draw his personal conclusions on the question of the reality of things.
In the same way, Alfred Korzybski (1978-1950) creator of the “general semantics”, affirmed that the “map is not the territory". A map will never be as precise and complete as the territory it represents. It is only a partial representation, at a given moment in time, of a non-fixed reality that is in constant evolution.



















• If I take a map of the City of London by way of example:
The map will never give me as much as details as the reality and the immensity of the space provide to me: nature (plants, animals, landscapes), distances, architecture, structures, human creations…etc.

Our reality (what we believe to be true), that is, our world, is only a representation of the reality of the world, there will always be a difference between the perception of the meaning of a thing and the thing itself.



Bibliography:


Books:

Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the image”, (1964)

Roland Barthes, « Mythologies », (1980)

Roland Barthes, « La Chambre Claire », (1980)

Erwin Panofsky, “Study of Iconology”, (1939)

Douglas Greenlee, “Peirce’s concept of sign”, (1973)

Edouard Pontremoli « L’excès du visible », « une approche phénoménologique de la photogénie », (1998)



Websites:

http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/semiosis.htm

http://www.businessinsider.com/roland-barthes-essay-mythologies-citroen-ds-2013-9?IR=T

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/the-irish-artist-who-captured-che-1.576934

http://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-clothing-industry/roland-barthes

http://www.helford2000.co.uk/the-map-is-not-the-territory-explained/

1) “How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?” (Barthes P152, 1977) Explain & critique this question posed by Roland Barthes using a range of design works of your choice as examples, making use of other writers work to expand the discussion.

Le Corbusier, « Chaise longue LC4 »
1928

“Guerillo Heroico” Photographied
by Alberto Korda, March 5, 1960

Original 1968 image stylized by Jim Fitzpatrick
Oil painting

René Magritte « Ceci n’est pas une pipe » (1928-1929)
Oil on Canvas 63.5 cm × 93.98 cm

https://maproom.net/shop/central-london-map/

http://myautoworld.com/autonews/13515