The Image as Analysis

Barthes in Rhetoric of the Image1 refers to the commonly perceived weakness of images in conveying meaning; firstly to the linguist’s refusal of the status of language to any system the lacks a digital code with which to re-articulate or convey in an intelligible format that wishing to be communicated; and secondly to the problem of the photograph’s closeness to reality2. However, he valiantly (if not without qualification) rises to the challenge:
Now even – and above all if – the image is in a certain matter the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of the process of signification. How does meaning get into an image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?3
And it is undeniable that the subjection of photographic images to semiotic analysis has proved an immensely powerful tool for media studies and has found use in a variety of institutions ranging from the commercial world of advertising to the military academy4.
In Rhetoric of the Image Barthes chooses an advertisement to illustrate his notions of the denoted and connoted messages and ideology in images. This seemingly simplistic or straightforward choice is a conscious one for Barthes because ‘the signification is undoubtedly intentional’5. But what of more complex images? Can a semiological method illuminate meaning where it is evidently less ‘undoubtedly intentional’? Images without the relatively clearer ideologies that advertising (or propagandist) images possess arguably evade such a deduction of meaning, and as such can present difficulty for a semiology of the image. Consideration of Arbus’ Identical Twins can perhaps draw out at least one of the limitations of the application of semiotic analysis to images Barthes alludes to; to throw light on the ‘limit of meaning’ to which he refers.



Figure 1 Diane Arbus Identical Twins, 1967

Building on the early work of Sausurre and Peirce, Barthes played a central role in the development of semiotics as a useful analytical tool. Acknowledging that ‘our perception and understanding of reality is constructed by the words and other signs which we use in a social context’6, he applied semiotic method to (amongst other mediums) images.

Literally speaking – denoted messages
The image Identical Twins is constituted of the iconic signs of two girls of close resemblance, or twins, standing on a brick path in front of a white wall. Barthes’ describes the denoted message as ‘a kind of Edenic state of the image; cleared utopianically of its connotations…radically objective…innocent’7; it is ‘what is left in the image when the signs of connotation are mentally deleted’8. It is for this reason that nothing further than this observation should be attempted. To make that step would require something more than the ‘first degree of intelligibility’9, which for the moment, and however artificial the ensuing discussion, must be ignored. Other denoted messages include the girls’ shared clothes – dresses with cuffs and collar, socks and hair bands – identically worn. They have identical hairstyles. The girls stand side by side, facing directly at the camera. One girl smiles, the other does not.
Barthes’ key observation with regard to the denoted image is to its ‘special role in the general structure of the iconic message’10:
The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is extremely dense11
So we are not simply then looking at a picture of two girls. In the image we would hope to find the meanings behind the denoted messages. Those twins, in that situation, should mean something.

In other words - connoted messages
The literal/denoted message carries with it its simple labelling function: “these here are identical twins”. But it is accompanied by connotations suggested by the twins – and furthermore: connotations suggested by this particular denotation of identical twins. It is important to note that the image does not denote any two people. Indeed, it is not an image of two sisters or even two non-identical twin sisters: each of these different denotations would carry different associations, different connotations.
So, what connotations are there in this image? And what then to do with these connotations? There seems a multitude of connotations in any image, only some will be visible to any individual reader, and each reader will choose his or her meanings. Therefore I intend to identify only some of the connoted messages that are visible to this reader, selected for their relevance to the suggested cultural meanings of the image outlined further below.
Firstly, the denoted message creates connotations of similarity12. We can observe that the twin girls are dressed identically (socks, dresses, hair bands), styled identically and posed identically. These are in fact a series of signifiers, each working with each other as (discontinuous) signs to thrust forward the concept of similarity. We are being forced to consider these two girls in terms of their outward appearance of similarity. One could also find connotations of reflection,
A second connotation would be that of the composition of the image, or the aesthetic signified. The girls are presented to the reader in formal, frontal terms, against a neutral – and resolutely uninformative – background. The aesthetic signified is important here – it reinforces our suspicion that Arbus in this image is concerned with our consideration of the meaning of the girls themselves, rather than the meaning of the girls’ relation to their immediate surroundings13. It also consciously lacks a prettified aesthetic, choosing for a scientific formality. Again this ushers us towards a meaning away from the consideration of beauty – both in terms of the girls (their value as aesthetic wonders is not directly Arbus’ concern here) and in terms of the image itself (this is not, nor is it intended to be, high street studio portraiture).
The subject matter itself draws associations with the popular and familiar concept of the family album. Indeed, much of Arbus’ work draws from vernacular photography to work as a stage on which to play out the themes and issues in her work. Such a use of a familiar mode can be seen as a democratic tool – Arbus wishes us to all to consider this image in terms of what we know. Using the family album as a reference point grounds the image in something we all understand (or at least think we understand) and in doing so opens up the image to all that wish to consider its meaning, rather than reserving it for an elite few with specialised knowledge.
On a similar vein, the image also draws associations with both historic photographers and photographic history in general. For example, it has been observed this image bears more than a passing resemblance to an image from the archive of August Sander14, and so what we know of Sander’s work we can sensibly and properly also compare with Arbus’. What was she intending by making this association with this particular photographer?



Figure 2 August Sander Farm Girls

The posing and the framing of the subjects in the image also allude to the earlier use of the photograph, most notable in Victorian England ‘as part of the tradition of enquiry into the health, housing, education, economic condition and moral state of the poor’15. The pseudo-scientific associations, the cataloguing and categorising empiricism (used here as much as anything as an aesthetic ‘mode’), that accompany such images are an ideal ground for Arbus to locate her discussion.
It is important to note some observations by Barthes. He grounds the image in the ‘normal system’ of language ‘whose signs are drawn from a cultural code’16, but highlights the originality of this system. Firstly: ‘the number of readings of the same lexical unit or lexia (of the same image) varies according to the individual’17. In other words: in contradistinction to the linguistic sign c-a-t that refers to the culturally agreed signified of a furry four-legged purring animal, in the visual sign, the signifier of twins leads us to a plurality of connotations. The number of readings becomes less strictly defined; expansive, but not infinite:
The variation of readings is not…anarchic: it depends on the different kinds of knowledge – practical, national, cultural, aesthetic – invested in the image18
Secondly, he comments that the connoted message is something more than its denoted equivalent – that it achieves a higher meaning, ‘the essential cipher of all possible’19 meanings. The ‘syntagmatic “flow” at the level of denotation’20 ‘speaks’ of symbolic meanings. So, for example, with Arbus’ Twins, the girls’ similarity becomes through connotation the purest idea of similarity, the archetype of reflection. And in our reading of the image, we consider this concept of similarity (and so also difference) in the abstract. This abstraction of the connoted or symbolic meaning is important to Barthes, as it links us to ideology, but is only able to do this through the ‘naturalising function of the denotation’21:
…the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence.22
The advertising image owes much of its power to this naturalising function, and much the same can be said for the seductive power of the photographic image in general23.

Rhetorically speaking – Myth and Ideology
As asked earlier –what to do with these connotations? Barthes observed that there is often purpose behind the denoted message and these connotations of the signs in an image work together to shape a particular message, a “myth”. Bignell usefully defines Barthes specific formulation of this term as a ‘way of thinking about people, products, places, or ideas, which are structured to send particular messages to the reader or viewer of the text’24; as ‘things used as signs to communicate a social and political message about the world’25.
So what of our image? It seems relatively clear that it fits within the definition of myth as ‘way(s) of thinking about people, products, places, or ideas… structured to send particular messages’: it is obvious that Arbus wishes us to consider the connotations of the image as a whole. Those connotations outlined above – similarity (or same-ness), reflection, formality, pseudo-scientific presentation, recalling the family album snapshot, referencing specific aspects of photographic history including conventions of portraiture – can be seen to come together to shape a particular message: in Clarke’s reading, that of ‘identity’26.
Clarke observation of the ‘mirror-like resemblance’ of the girls can perhaps be extended: Arbus is commenting on (Western) society’s predilections for surface appearance27 and misconceived notions of the true likeness of photographic images.
Clarke infers that through our searching of the similarities between the girls, we conclude only differences:
Eyebrows, fringes, hair, and hairbands are different. The more we continue to look, the more the merest detail resonates as part of a larger enigmatic presence and tension as to what, exactly, we are being asked to look at.28
This is likened to language itself – that our language system produces meaning in signs through difference from all other signs – and opens Arbus’ image further to a discussion about the very language of the Image on its most philosophical, semantic level.
Is this though the mythology that Barthes expounds? It would seem so: the iconic sign of identical twins is made, by will of the author/artist, to function as a signifier on another level. Yet in an important way it falls short of Barthes’ definition. Bignell re-states Barthes requirement for a myth: ‘to hollow out the signs it uses, leaving only part of their meaning, and to invest them with a new signification which directs us to read them in one way and no other’29. For our image, this seems to overshoot the mark: the undoubted plurality of connotations surely excludes the triumphant finality of the one single reading? The reading provided by Clarke is only ever one of many. And it seems churlish to suggest that this image is therefore somehow weak as a result of its lacking a clear myth. Since Barthes’ notion if ideology flows from this presence of a myth in this particular formulation, it warrants some consideration.

The limit of meaning
It is this author’s view that at this point in Barthes analysis, images like Arbus’ Identical Twins depart from those more usually exemplified in texts on semiotics30. This is directly related to the overtly political assertions that commonly underlie analysis of cultural items:
In Barthes’ work, and in the work of many semiotic critics, the analysis of culture and society is carried out from a left-wing perspective, and often closely tied to Marxist ideas.31
The ‘usual’ framing of Barthes semiotic analysis in terms of a political masking of constructed meaning under the appearance of a ‘naturalised’ message can distract the reader of images away from apolitical connotations. Use of the denoted messages as platforms on which connoted messages can be presented and discussed can be skilfully expounded without recourse to such an overtly political ‘ideology’. Indeed, in the reading of Arbus’ image given above, it is as if the image itself is some kind of semiotic analysis; the image as an analytical tool with which to consider cultural attitudes and ideologies, of issues pertinent to Arbus’ (and so much also our) generation: identity, self-perception and comparison. What Identical Twins lacks, as do many photographs, is undoubted intentionality. And this is here not a weakness in the image, it is rather its strength; and the ‘limit of meaning’, once reached and unfettered by intention, breaches the bounds of ideology into discourse at a more profound and complex level – the image as analysis rather than the image as analysed.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Richard Howard, trans., Vintage, 2000
Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, trans., Fontana, 1984
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Annette Lavers, trans., Paladin Grafton Books, 1973
Bignell, Jonathan, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, 2nd ed., Manchester University Press, 2002
Clarke, Graham, The Photograph, Oxford History of Art, Oxford University Press, 1997
Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Penguin, 1979
Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed., Routledge, 2006


















1 In Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, trans., Fontana, 1984, pp32-51


2 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.32. This is a recurrent theme in discussions on meaning in photographic images. Sontag also articulates: “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” In Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Penguin, 1979, p.4


3 ibid. p.32. Barthes’ qualification ‘and above all if’ is key here, given his doubt as to the existence of this ‘veritable ontology’ of signification in images, something which is observable throughout all his work on the subject. Barthes described in Camera Lucida after years of writing on the subject, how he was ‘overcome by an “ontological desire”’, but ‘wasn’t sure that Photography existed, that it had a “genius” of its own’ Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Vintage, 2000, p.3


4 Bignell, Jonathan, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, 2nd ed., Manchester University Press, 2002, p.27


5 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.33


6 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.5


7 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.42


8 ibid. p.42


9 ibid. p.42


10 ibid. p.45


11 ibid. p.45


12 Barthes would perhaps choose the seme of connotation here as ‘Same-ness’


13 or as Graham Clarke more succinctly puts it “The questions raised (about the meaning of the girls) are made more insistent by the way in which both figures are framed within a photographic space which denies them any obvious historical or social context” Clarke, Graham, The Photograph, Oxford History of Art, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.29


14 Noah’s Ark, Arbus’ Album


15 Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed., Routledge, 2006, p.75


16 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.46; Bignell usefully expands on this: “In each case, there is a material signifier, which expresses the sign, and a mental concept, a signified, which immediately accompanies it. Visual signs also belong to codes, are arranged in syntagms, and selected from paradigms” Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.14


17 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.46


18 ibid. p.46


19 ibid. P.48


20 ibid. p. 51


21 ibid. p.51


22 ibid. p.51


23 or in Arbus’ own words “The endlessly seductive puzzle of sight” Clarke, The Photograph, p.28


24 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.16. Barthes finds enormous currency in this notion, and his collection of essays ‘Mythologies’ revels in the analysis of seemingly any cultural artefact, from wrestling to margarine.


25 ibid. p.22


26 Clarke The Photograph, p.27-31


27 An issue that resounds even more strongly today than for Arbus


28 Clarke The Photograph, p.30


29 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.23


30 Advertising, propagandist imagery, magazines, newspapers, computer games


31 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.25




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