“Barthes noted that at the ‘level of production’, ‘the photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional or ideological norms’ and at the ‘level of reception’, the photograph ‘is not not only perceived, received, it is read, connected by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs’. Reading a photograph involved relating it to a ‘rhetoric’. In addition to the photographic techniques already noted, he refers for instance to the signifying functions of: postures, expressions and gestures; the associations evoked by depicted objects and settings; sequences of photographs, e.g. in magazines (which he refers to as ‘syntax’); and relationships with accompanying text. He added that ‘thanks to the code of connotation the reading of the photograph is… always historical; it depends on the reader’s “knowledge” just as though it were a matter of a real language, intelligible only if one has learned the signs’.”
Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners
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