Myth, Connotation and the Meaning of Images

Myth, Connotation and and the Meaning of Images Myth, Connotation and the Meaning of Images In Trolley New Orleans, as in all images, we can discern multiple levels of meaning. Here, the interpretive analytic system of semiotics can help us to understand how meaning is generated. Barthes uses the terms denotative and connotative to describe different kinds and levels of meaning produced at the same time and for the same viewer in the same photograph. An image can denote certain apparent truths, providing documentary evidence of objective circumstances. The denotative meaning of the image refers to its literal, explicit meaning. The same photograph may connote more culturally specific associations and meanings. Connotative meanings are informed by the cultural and historical contexts of the image and its viewers' lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances-all that the image means to them personally and socially. The two concepts, denotation and connotation, can be useful because they help us to think about the ways in which images function both narrowly to signify literal, denoted meanings and expansively to connote culturally and contextually specific meanings. Connotation is a primary means through which images convey values. In this use of the term, myth refers to how images work ideologically. For Barthes, myth is the hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are specific to certain groups, are made to seem natural, universal, and given for a whole society. Myth allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image to appear as denotative. The cover photograph is a close-up on the face of an African boy in a French military uniform. Its caption reads: "The nights of the army. Little Diouf has come from Ouagadougou with his comrades, children reared by the A.O.F. army to open the fantastic spectacle that the French Army presents this week at the Palais des Sports." The image, Barthes proposes, does not simply present a boy saluting. This, Barthes notes, is the basic meaning of the picture. The representation of smiles has meant many things throughout history. The Mona Lisa, for example, is famous in part for Leonardo da Vinci's rendering of the model's smile, which has been widely described as enigmatic, as if the model were hiding a secret. This symbol, which proliferated on buttons and T-shirts in the late twentieth century, also inspired the common emoticon practice that first appeared in the use of punctuation in email to signify a smile :-) and then became the basis for the smiley face emoticons available as cell phone fonts. Is the little boy in The First Murder smiling or grimacing? How does the context, which we learn from the related photographs and from the written history of Weegee's practice, help us to determine the meaning of the boy's expression? Chinese artist Yue Minjun has created paintings evoking "Symbolic smiles," making reference to the images and sculptures of laughing Buddha and ironically commenting on the smile as a mask. The smiles in Yue's paintings seem to rise from anxiety, stretched across faces in painful caricature, connoting the irony, folly, and artificial sincerity of everyday life. We can infer these connotations from his painting Butterfly, with its exaggerated smiles, distorted faces, horned heads, and strange and naked red bodies, which are all juxtaposed with colorful butterflies, suggesting the famous "Butterfly dream" described in a poem about transformation by the Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou in which a man's passing dream of being a happy butterfly is confused with reality. We can also learn more about those connotations by finding out about the cultural meanings of the smile in China and about the artist himself, whose work is part of the Chinese art movement of cynical realism, as well as by consulting sources on both modern and traditional China, Chinese painting, and the legacies of the laughing Buddha and Zhuang Zhou's butterfly poem. Whereas the Buddha is laughing in contentment, Yue's figures seem to be smiling in anxiety or even agony. These are very different smiles from the generic smiley-face grin or the enigmatic, barely turned-up lips of the Mona Lisa..