Roland Barthes analyzes an advertising image. He uses the panzani brand ad to analyze and find the different messages that are conveyed.
There are three messages,
Linguistic, Connoted and Denoted
“If our reading is satisfactory, the photograph analyzed offers us three
messages: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded
iconic message”
“Hence in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic message is one of these techniques.”
“At the level of the literal message, the text replies-in a more or
less direct, more or less partial manner – to the question: what is lf ? The text
helps to identify purely and simply the elements of the scene and the scene
itself; it is a matter of a denoted description of the image (a description
which is often incomplete) or, in Hjelmslev’s terminology, of an operation (as
opposed to connotation)”
“Another difficulty in analyzing connotation is that there is no particular analytical language corresponding to the particularity of its signifieds-how are the signifieds of connotation to be named?”
“When it comes to the “symbolic message,” the linguistic message no longer
guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vise which
holds the connoted meanings from proliferating, whether towards excessively individual regions (it limits, that is to say, the projective power of the
image) or towards dysphoric values”
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