Semiotics

 

What is Semiotics? In simple words it is a study of signs. Although it is not enough to fully describe what that stands for.  It is a study of  cultural, social and historical processes through which signs (such as photographs) gain meaning. Semiotics teaches us that everything around us is a sign , that reality is a system of signs. It tells us not to take everything for real. As a result of Roland Barthes’ work “Mythologies” semiotics began to become a major approach to cultural studies in the late 1960s.

Barthes declared that semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits: images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, essentially all of the ways in which information can be communicated as a message. Owing to Barthes’s theories contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic “sign systems” such as a medium or genre.

An American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce described semiotic as  “an action , or influence , which is, or involves,    an operation of three subjects, such as a sign , its object, and its interpretant (…)”

Semiotics is usually divided into three branches:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer

Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures

Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on those (people) who use them

Short film about semiotics:

Semiotics of toilet signs:

   

   Bibliography

Hegemony and Mass Culture: A semiotic approach. M. Gottdiener. Univeristy of California, Riverside.

Berger, John (2008) Ways of seeing, Penguin Modern Classicswww.aber.ac.uk/media

Barthes, Roland (1993) Mythologies, Vintage Classics

Polaroid and art

    The invention of Polaroid was a great answer to western society’s motto: “I want everything, and I want it now”. In 1947 American Erwin Land shorten the time between the shot and the print to one minute. One year later the first Polaroid Land Camera has appeared on the market-big and heavy construction that only rich people had access to. However the modernization was going fast, the camera was becoming handier and after few decades became popular.  In 1975 Polaroid Company advertised the product saying “you wouldn’t stop it, now you can see the images everywhere”.
Just like daguerreotypes in the beginning of photography history, images from Polaroid were unique and  duplicateable only by use of  reproduction. Combination of spontaneity and uniqueness of the photographs quickly drew artists’ attention.
Paul De Nooijer played with the reproduction. He was using the pictures that he’s just taken to take another one. That transformation of the reality led to something called  hyperrealism. In the early 70’s Andy Warhol purchased Polaroid “Big Shot” which he was using during long séances with his sitters. By doing that he could incessantly control the effects and gradually come closer to his ideal artistic intension.
Stefan de Jaeger  was the first artist to use Polaroid to make serious photographic works. His method brings together the immediacy that Polaroid creates-from shutter to print in a few moments.De Jaeger takes Polaroids of parts of his subject’s body,

a process that reflects the body in fragments and in motion since the artist builds the portrait piece by piece. The point of view shifts as the artist points the camera down at the feet, rises to focus on the hands and again to look at the face. The model can slightly move and shift his position as well as light can change.

 

Stefan De Jaeger, Stéphane et Michael, 1983. Polaroid collage, 61 x 55”. Collection of Stéphane Janssen

Another artists to use Polaroid as a medium of his art was David Hockney. His series are very subjective reflections of his perception of reality. For example  crazy tableau, where packs of cigarettes, dancing Fred Aster can be seen as well as a garden of cactuses, legs warming up by the fire place or a person on a couch-broken to pieces.
The image, collage entitled “Pearblossom Hwy”, Hockney created using hundreds of photographs taken from many positions and angles during an eight-day shoot.   

The mix of the reality and fiction, the direct confrontation of “truth” and “false” is what has settled the popularity of Polaroid photography.

David Hackney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18 April 1986