The Rhetoric of the Image - Roland Barthes

This was hard to read!! When they said it wasn't exactly an easy read I didn't realise it would be this hard! It took a lot of re-reading and note taking, but finally I think I am beginning to understand it...just. I do think reading this helps to understand Assignment 2 better and the ways of going about it though.

The hidden messages in pictures can sometimes be hard to see, but reading this essay helped understand how to subtract different messages from an image. The section 'the linguistic message' was interesting - thinking about different types of images in books...some images are there simply to back up what the text is saying, the text adds more information to them, and other images don't need much text to be interpreted - they tell the story and get their point across without it. Interesting when usually you would read a book and look at the pictures - not necessarily analyse them. But now I realise that pictures can also add more to the text, not just help you understand it...maybe there should have been more pictures in this essay! Images now are very powerful and used in many texts to do just this - help the reader understand better. And images themselves often have their own text, providing the interpretation so the reader doesn't have to look more into it. As Barthes points out - even as time goes on we still need to use text, images and pictures are not enough for us to completely understand something - they just help. And the text helps the image - short messages prevent people from misinterpreting it and getting the wrong message - it helps the viewer to choose the right way of looking at the image. You rarely see an image which relays the message alone.

The advert itself has hidden signs wrapped up in the composition of the still life, and each sign has its own meaning. Different people will extract different messaes from images, depending on the way their brain works. Some messages will be more obvious to some than to others. This is what I will be looking at in the next part of this assignment.