'The rhetoric of the image' Roland Barthes/ Semiotics - Approaches & Theory.
Images are there to communicate themselves without the aid of text, images are often derived from Popular culture.
For example the image below is taken from 'The Only Way Is Essex'.
Denote - It's a group of boys and girls, being cheerful and smiling whilst sat on a gold sofa.
The connotation of this is that; The smiles show them having fun, expressing their joy and spur for life. Being as a group suggests a strong friendship, popularity and socialising. The gold sofa represents royalty, money and the ideal of class and sophistication.
A connotation expresses the other layers of meaning.
Rudolf Wittkower uses the same sort of symbols to represent things in our lives - 'One culture picked up and transformed, images that of another.' Using symbolism decodes the image this way. The cultural context is incredibly important.
We use our cultural context to communicate what it is it means, connotations have a link to ideology, values and beliefs. It is the images that we produce that make us a vehicle of communication, expressing our views taken from the culture.
‘Another difficulty in analysing connotation is that there is no particular analytical language corresponding to the particularity of its signifieds - how are the signifieds of connotation to be named ?’
Roland Barthes ‘The Rhetoric of the Image ‘ in Image, Music Text 1977 p.47
"This common domain of the signifieds of connotation is that of Ideology, which cannot but be single for a given society and history, no matter what signifiers of connotation it may use.
To the general ideology, that is, correspond signifiers of connotation which are specified according to the chosen substance. These signifiers will be called connotators and the set of connotators a rhetoric, rhetoric thus appearing as the signifying aspect of ideology."
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