Semiotics of Photography

In the modern, technologically developed world, man is exposed to photographs such as billboards, advertisers, and magazines more than ever. Visual impact, as the most convincing form of attracting attention, affects the formation of opinions and attitudes. It encourages consumption and serves many other commercial or political purposes. Therefore, semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, becomes a more important scientific discipline in explaining socio-semiotic aspects of society. 

Semiotics of photography can be described as one part of science that deals specifically with understanding the nature and specific features of meaning, colloquially named image. The scope of such specialization includes proving the semiotic character of image, studying particularities that differ imaging from other types of meaning, especially visual or meaning based on iconography or intrinsic motivation, and considering ways in which more kinds of image meanings can differ without losing the essential characteristics of the image category.

Semiotics as a theory of characters is the sum of the meanings, allusions, and presentations. Photography as a sign needs such exact elements of identifying that it could be properly explained. The difference between the graphic of the image, as its base, and iconography, as the base, is fundamental. It is actually the essence of diversity between two directions. A graphical view of the image shifts focuses from its essential existence to the very act of shooting. At the same time, a high number of amateur photographers is the real function of the image, better than several art photographers whose work is closed in galleries.

Photography can be analyzed using four models: Narrative, two variants of rhetoric, and the Laokont model. The narrative model is of key importance in some areas of semiotics, but its usability in the semiotics of image is very limited. It concludes that the title or text combined with the photo is a parasitic message. While accompanying text may give a new meaning, such as the continuation of the story shown in the photography, it usually only transmits connotation already featured in it