MPS 306 Lecture 2: Idea of Photography
18 Jan 2019
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Document Summary
Structuralism and semiotics, the place of language in representation. Language and sign system: human intellectual and social life is based on the production, use and exchange of signs and representations. When we gesture, talk, write, read, watch a tv program, listen to music, look at a painting we are engaged in sign-based representational behaviour. Theorists maintain that texts produce photographs: the textual context directs how we understand an image. John hillaiard, cause of death?, 1974: took the same image of someone lying on the ground covered in a blanket and cropped the same photo in many different ways to tell a different story, crushed, drowned, burned, fell. It shows that language is socially constructed over time. It shows us that the meaning of words is not natural/inherent. Therefore, meaning is not inherent in things- we assign meaning to things through naming them: while meaning might be arbitrary, syntax is not.
