24 April
Victor Burgin’s Looking at Photographs (Ch. 6) – ‘Thinking Photography, 1982
In Looking at Photographs, Burgin discusses photography in particular as a media ‘text’:
Photographs are texts… what we may call photographic discourse… [which] is the site of a complex ‘intertextuality’.
As an introductory reading to media ‘texts’, the analysis and deconstruction on photography is quite interesting. In relation to the textual analysis applied to photography and media ‘texts’ in general, Burgin discusses semiology:
Semiotics or semiology is the study of signs, with the object of identifying the systematic regularities from which meanings are construed.
The focus on semiotics in the reading drew parallels to this week’s lectorial discussion whereby semiotic textual analysis was introduced. Signs, denotations and connotations, and codes are primary aspects of semiology. The chapter concluded with a description of the four ostensible types of ‘look’ in a photograph: the look of the camera; the look of the viewers’ perspective; the ‘intra-diegetic’ looks exhanged between subjects and objects in the photograph; and the look the subject gives to the camera.The reading was a good introduction to semiotics however did not go into much depth in relation to what a media ‘text’ is. The second reading, however, did.
Gill Branston’s & Roy Stafford’s Approaching media texts – ‘The media student’s book’, 2010
[Media texts] are seen as actually structuring the very realities which they seem to ‘describe’ or ‘stand in for’.
In structuralist analysis of texts and semiotics, the text is considered a highly structured work that’s intentional deconstruction of this structure generates meaning. Textual analysis is easily supported through evidential aspects of the text. The two approaches to media texts are qualitative and quantitative, or semiotic and content, analysis.
With semiotic analysis we, the audience, are called ‘readers’, partly as a way of emphasising that we are dealing with something learnt rather than ‘natural’ and partly to indicate the degree of activity needed to make sense of signs.
Quantitative or content analysis, on the other hand, focuses on the parallels and patterns between the aspects of texts and the intertextual relationships with other texts – both explicitly represented and alluded to. Charles Sanders Peirce states that there are three types of signs in relation to semiotics:
Symbol: Signs for which the relation is arbitrary… there is no necessary connection
Icon: Signs which resemble what they stand for
Index: Casual link between the sign and what it stands for
Index is the type of sign that is most subjective in semiotics and can generate different meanings dependent on the knowledge of the ‘viewer’: their personal knowledge and experiences; their opinions and perspectives; their goals and motivations.
I am now feeling crazily nostalgic this week in relation to the lectorial’s focus and the readings. I am brought back to my prior learnings of the four approaches to meaning in texts: author-centred, reader-centred, textual analysis, and world-context approaches. I would like to delve into structuralism, post-structuralism, marxism and psychoanalysis again for Project Brief 4; I think they will amazingly compliment the semiotics of textual analysis. My group has been given ‘texts’ as our basis.