Rhetoric of Images

Rhetoric of Image talks of the messages a photograph or an image may have. According to Roland Barthes an image in Latin means imitation of something. Barthes thinks that images are analogical representations of other things and wonders if they have a language that gives the meaning of what they were created for. Barthes considers an image as an ultimate resurrection of a life experience or a mythical thought of life. Many people believe that an image cannot be compared with language because it is limited to meaning of various things. However, there are other individuals who consider the meaning of an image to be more than its significance (Barthes 1978, 33).

Barthes defines the meaning of an image by finding out how the image gets it meaning, where the meaning of the image ends and how far the meaning of an image can go. In his explanation, Barthes looks at the three types of messages within an image, which are the linguistic message, the symbolic message and the literal or the denoted message (Barthes 1978, 36). I will explain the three types of image message with the examples from the photograph of the breaker boys working in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Company taken in 1911.

The first image language according to Barthes is the linguistic message. The linguistic message or code is the connection between the language and the picture. Barthes talks of two types of linguistic messages, which are denoted message and the connoted message (Barthes 1978, 37). Denoted message is the literal or the commonsense meaning of a sign. The denoted message can also be called the dictionary meaning. Barthes believes that a photograph without a sign or a code is entirely denotative. To him a photograph is not only a representative of an...

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...onic message is a factual and abstract way of interpreting some feature in an image. The viewer looks at the photograph in a. The abstract way of looking at the image will depend on the socio-cultural context of the person. For example in the breakers boys photograph, darkness in the background may signify sorrow, sufferings and sadness that the boys experienced because of the poor working conditions in the Pennsylvania company (Barthes 1978, 45).

Finally, non-coded iconic message is the literal interpretation of the entire photograph. The feature of the image remains the same as viewed without the inferred meaning. In the breakers boys’ photo, the darkness in the background may just mean that it was late in the evening when the photograph was taken. The look in the boys’ faces may mean nothing else apart from the normal exhaustion that a person feels after work.