Activity 2A, Barthes

We were asked to read Roland Barthes famous essay The Rhetoric of the image, it was quite hard going as it has been written in academic French and then translated into English so some of the sentences didn't make sense, but despite this i found it easier to understand than The Culture of design.

I gathered the main points that Barthes was trying to make were that an image without text should be strong enough to give off a particular message, but by standing alone it creates questions as an image can be ambiguous and depending on the individual a different message may be picked up than desired. He says that all images are polysemous and they contain many signifieds which viewers either chooses to ignore or see, meaning that an image alone may not always be effective.

By adding text to an image you can automatically draw someone to the desired point as you eliminate any other meanings the image produced when it stood alone and direct them exactly to the point. This is useful for advertising as they need to create an advert where the point can be picked up straight away as generally when looking at an advert you don't have more than a couple of minutes to take in what is being seen, so there is no time for confusion. This is why adverts generally include a linguistic message such as a caption to manipulate the viewer in to seeing exactly what they want them to.

In the advert of the pasta Barthes says there are several messages being produced, the first being the linguistic message which is created by the word "Panzani" this makes the viewer aware of the company name as well as hinting at Italianicity. The image used also hints at the Italianicity due to the colour scheme used, as well as suggesting several other things such as he freshness of the products and the range of products they produced, which is emphasized by the products overflowing from the bag. In this case no text would be required to pick up on these messages as the image alone allowed for this conclusion to be created.

Comics are created with strong images so that a reader can quickly scan the images and understand the story being told with out much thought, text is included but it becomes part of the image telling the story rather than manipulating your thoughts unlike advertising.

So is text always needed?, does it just repeat or back up what is already there or does it add something else to the image? I suppose it all depends on the image, i f a strong enough image is created then it can stand alone while giving of the same or even more powerful message than one accompanied by a linguistic message.

After reading this essay we were asked to discuss this with our groups, although i have not had a change to discuss this with my group yet i have discussed it with other class members and we seem to have drawn similar conclusion.