Chapter three, the meanings of photographs:

Semiotics is a typical technique used to analyse photographs. Ferdinand de Saussure states that a linguistic sign is made up of the signifier and the signified, the signifier being the object and the signified being the mental process that occurs after seeing or hearing the signifier. This system is called semiology. Roland Barthes suggests in ‘elements of semiology’, that ‘signs need to be considered in relation to their role in culture’. Linguist Louis Hjelmslev, came up with the terms denotation and connotation to describe the communication the audiences have with the images. Louis Althusser, argued that ideology is ‘a shared set of beliefs, learned and reinforced by the masses themselves’. Barthe also stated that images have more than one potential meaning, he called this polysemy or polysemic. Sigmund Freud stated that the experiences and desires we all share help us to achieve a common interpretation of a photograph. He thought that everyone’s minds had a pre conscious, conscious and the unconscious. The conscious part of the mind is the part where are speech, actions and thoughts are controlled. The unconscious part of our mind stores the anxieties and desires the conscious mind cannot handle. Freud suggests that these anxieties and desires are experiences that the person has come across in their lives. He also argued that many of these desires and anxieties come from experiences as a child. Lastly, the Preconscious part of our mind where are thoughts are stored. The preconscious acts as a guardian of the thoughts but sometimes these thoughts slip through into the conscious and we say things we shouldn’t say.

Freud comments on the Oedipus complex, which he named after the Greek myth of Oedipus who killed his father and married his mother. This Is where a child (a boy) has a very close connection to his mother when he is born and soon becomes jealous of his father as a dominant man, wanting his mother to himself. Freud suggests that this results in the child fantasying about killing the father. Later on, he suggests that the child will witness that his mother does not have a penis and will think she lacks something as a woman, creating the woman’s body for a ‘sight of desire and anxiety’. The child also thinks that the father has cut off the mother’s penis, resulting in the child seeing the father to have power. Laura Mulvey in her book ‘Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema’ focuses on scopophilia and narcissistic identification. Scopophilia is the idea of looking, which can turn into voyeurism. She focuses on the idea of unequal gender roles in the narrative cinema, males as active and females as passive. Mulvey Notes through linking to Freud’s Oedipus theory that, ‘the complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object, or turning the represented figure into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.’ Barthe created the word stadium, which could be said to be the general experience a viewer would get form an image, for example, a starving child evokes the emotions of pity from the viewer. He states that the punctum is what affects the viewer in a personal way, he states that time and morality often come into this.