Abstract
The study of photography has been a fundamental testing case for pictorial semiotics, in part because, being in a sense machine made, photographs would seem to resist the critique of iconicity, and in part because they could be said to involve all the three semiotic grounds, iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, but in different proportions. The present chapter is an overview of the lively discussion that raged over the nature of photography at the end of the last century, notably involving authors such as Vanlier, Dubois, and Schaeffer, who defended the idea that photographs were essentially indexical. It also summarizes the criticism of this stance expressed by the present author, arguing that the photograph must be iconical before it is indexical, and adds some new twists to this criticism, which brings us into general semiotical theory.
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Notes
- 1.
In Barthes (1964a see Barthes 1982, p. 34 f.) photography, as a message without a code is actually opposed to drawing, which is supposedly three times coded. It is a curious fact that Barthes’s acceptance of a convention theory as far as (all?) pictures that are not photographs are concerned is never noted in the literature, where Barthes is often supposed to be a defender of naive analogism generally. Interestingly, convention is here not identified with the presence of features, double articulation, and the like, as even Eco (1968) initially thought necessary, only to retract himself later (Eco 1976), and as Lindekens (1971, 1976) continued to assume. We will return below to the three reasons Barthes adduces for the drawing being coded.
- 2.
Also cf. the notion of a “savoir latéral” according to Schaeffer (1987, p. 87 ff.) and passim.
- 3.
What I try to accomplish in this section is, as the title says, a short history of photographic semiotics. The only other such attempt I know of is found in Nöth (1985, pp. 427–428), and although the survey is well informed and well written like most parts of Nöth’s handbook, it is extremely short, and it fails to note some of the important problems, and the contributions to their solution; but it is true that most of the latter were published fairly recently, at a time when Nöth had possibly finished editing his book. Indeed, the second edition (Nöth 2000) adds a little about indexicalist theories. Therefore, I will concentrate on writing the history here, and leave most of the comments for later sections. However, I will not abstain from pinpointing the methodological character of the works, as well as the models employed, since this will be of importance later.
- 4.
According to Ramírez (1981, p. 220 ff.), who treats the comic strip and the photo novella together, both these are multilayered connotational systems, in which the multiple expression planes are constituted out of the entire sign of each lower level. This is of course nonsense: Ramírez confuses the compound sign occurrence with connotational language, just as Larsen and Floch do when they identify Barthes’s rhetoric with Panofsky’s iconology (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 123 ff.), and analogously to the way in which Barthes, in a quite different context, takes the probabilistic organization of the medical symptom to indicate double articulation (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 17 ff.). A few brief, mainly historical remarks on the photo novella, may also be found in Gubern (1987a, p. 253 f.).
- 5.
The arguments against Lindekens presented by Schaeffer (1987, p. 41 ff.) are more anecdotal, as are also those of Lindekens’s arguments he turns against. I have dealt with the contradictions of the ethnological and psychological evidence in Sonesson (1989a, p. 251 ff.). As for the points I have tried to make above, it should be noted that Lindekens (1976, p. 81 f.) later observes that the trait “nuancé/contrasté” is only a potential iconeme, as long as we are not acquainted with the entire pictorial system, which sounds as an advance criticism of the use to which the opposition is put in the work of Vilches (1983a,b, p. 45 ff.), which I have discussed in Sonesson (1989a), I.3.4. Unfortunately, Lindekens then goes on to claim that the extent of variation possible inside an iconeme can only be determined through the work of chemical and optical analysis; which is true as far as irrelevant variants are concerned, but a countersense if the determination of the limits of variations is meant—for, as Lindekens (1976, p. 76 f.) himself observes, we are concerned with the equivalents of phonological, not phonetic, traits!
- 6.
Enel’s model has been formulated for the analysis of publicity, which, most of the time, involves photographic elements. The distinction between the system of real objects and the system of the picture is undoubtedly much less straightforward in the case of paintings and drawings, but it does exist, as discussed in Sonesson (1989a, p. 209 ff.).
- 7.
“Natural sign” should here be taken in the old meaning, as that which has not been culturally instituted, and which may have more affinities with what we would now call an indexical sign than with the iconical ones. Thus, Dégerando talks of the “natural sign” which consists in one animal observing the flight of another one of the same species and following the example. For discussion, see Sonesson (1989a, p. 213 ff.). The point here is that we may be “naturally disposed” to react in particular ways to differing degrees of brightness. The fact that different motives developed with the same degree of brightness are differently interpreted would seem to throw serious doubts on at least this simple variant of the “naturalistic” hypothesis, but there are of course ways in which it may be amended.
- 8.
In our own study (cf. Bengtsson et al. 1988), concerned with angles of vision, we also varied the experimental procedure somewhat, obtaining differently distinct results. In the first case, photographs depicting three different actors in the course of expressing four different emotions photographed at the identical moment from three angles of vision were shown in random order. In the second case, the three shots taken from different angles of vision at the same moment and extracted from the mimic sequence of one and the same actor were mounted together on a frame. The result was much clearer in the first case. This may be similar to the two procedures employed by Espe (though this remains somewhat uncertain), but I am not sure Espe is right in describing the latter experimental situation as being the most realistic one. In fact, most of the time, we perceive single photographs, maybe just one photograph published by a newspaper, which has been selected from an extensive series of pictures taken of the same event at the same occasion. It is indeed rare that we are called upon to compare different photographs, in particular those that show an identical object at an identical time and place.
- 9.
It should be noted that it is quite intentionally that I here avoid Peirce’s own terms, representamen and object (to which a third one, the interpretant, should be added), in order not to introduce more confusion than is necessary. In any case, it is quite certain that the object is not the referent: that distinction would rather correspond to the one between the immediate and the dynamic object. Also, the interpretant is not the content, though it is more difficult to say what exactly it is (cf. discussion in Sonesson (1989a, p. 201 ff.)). On the adequate characterization of the index, see also op. cit., p. 30 ff., as well as most of the sections below. The formulation above only serves to introduce the issue.
- 10.
To judge from the title, this is the exclusive subject matter of Delord’s (1981) earlier book, which is unfortunately out of print.
- 11.
Floch (1986a, p. 12) even compares the study of semiotic specificity with the quarrel over the possibility of art in photography which raged in 1850s. But these are really very different questions, on two counts. First, the questions are different, because, in the first case, we only want to characterize a category (“photography”); in the second case, we are concerned to relate two socially given categories (“art” and “photography”). Second, “art” is a notoriously difficult category to define, because it is differently delimitated, through the ages, and in different social groups; but nothing of the sort is true of photography. When Floch (1986a, p. 13) claims that to describe these social division blocks is “au mieux, expliciter un système connotatif”, this only goes to show that he does not know what connotations are, for only semiotic systems and their parts may connote, in Hjelmslev’s sense (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 179 ff.).
- 12.
In a structure, as I noted in Sonesson (1989a, p. 81 ff.), the parts interact and so mutually modify each other, or even create each other, as is the case of the phonological oppositions. Thus, if the semiotic function is structural, as it certainly was to Hjelmslev, content and expression cannot be freely exchanged and recombined, as the Greimaseans think.
- 13.
The latter is more doubtful, in any case. For instance, if we define iconicity as “un effet de sense de ‘réalité’” (Floch 1984a, p. 12), we will easily find it also in verbal discourses; but by admitting this definition, we have already given up the peculiarity of iconicity, and we have deprived ourselves of the possibility of discovering that there is a peculiarity of pictoriality, inside that of iconicity (Cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 201 ff.).
- 14.
In view of the question concerning the generalizability of binary contrasts, which I formulated in Sonesson (1989a, p. 132 ff.), is interesting to note that Floch (1986a, b, p. 26) actually claims that it is because visual messages are not naturally resolvable into discrete parts, that he has chosen to centre his interest on such pictures as are organized around binary contrasts of value, colour, shapes, and so on. This would seem to imply that Floch would recognize the existence of pictures that are not binarily built, but it does not answer the query whether those features, which are discovered by means of binary contrasts in some pictures, are then thought to be projectable to pictures lacking contrasts.
- 15.
It so happens that I have elsewhere attempted an analysis of some aspects of Matisse’s cut-out “Nu bleu IV” (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 310 ff.), and that I had independently been struck be the similarities between this cut-out and Brandt’s “Nu”; this is why I have also studied the similarities and difference of these two pictorial kinds in Sonesson (1989b).
- 16.
The discussion of post-photographic images would take us too far in the present context, but two relatively recent contributions to this study, apart from our own work, must at least be mentioned here: Maldondo (1994) and Barboza (1996).
- 17.
This is only part of Gubern’s classification, which also distinguishes pictures accordingly as they are autogenerated or exogenous, private or public, bidimensional or tridimensional, and fixed, sequential, or mobile. More to the point, for our present purposes, is Gubern’s threefold division of all visual information into the visible natural world, the visible cultural world, and the gestual system, where then those parts of the visible cultural world that are specifically destined to visual communication are separated into writing (Espe’s typographics), pictures, and other kinds of signalling devices. Gubern may be right, from a certain point of view, in letting the branch of typographics separate out earlier than the others, since they do not contain pictures in an ordinary sense, but our point of departure here is the more general category of markings on surfaces.
- 18.
That is, at least some subgroup of computer-produced pictures, whereas another subgroup may, as far as its productive link is concerned, come closer to freehand drawing.
- 19.
Thus, if postmodernism is really epitomizing the indexicality character of photography, as Krauss would like us to believe, it is a latecomer to the game, for the most “revolutionary” images of today are not indexicality based!
- 20.
It includes hand-held tools. There is a problem, of course, in determining the limits between such tools and certain simpler kinds of machines.
- 21.
Indexicalities, as they are defined in Sonesson (1989a), are not indexical signs, because they fail to fulfil the requirements of having discontinuous parts, but under certain circumstances, they may be exploited for the building of signs.
- 22.
See the discussions of Vanlier’s “minceur de champs” in the following subsection!
- 23.
It is because Barthes always maintained, from his earliest to his last work on our theme, that the photograph conveys the idea, when observing the scene depicted, of “cela a été”, that Dubois is able to muster him also among the supporters of indexicality. But this is of course a very indirect way of invoking indexicality, for it merely attends to the temporal aspect (on which see my discussion of Schaeffer below), not to the contiguity from which is may be taken to result, nor its particular modes. That is, Barthes reads indexicality on the purely ideological plane.
- 24.
It is interesting to note that Schaeffer (1987, p. 59 f.) explicitly rejects the photogram as a candidate for consideration, although he does not mention Dubois’s divergent opinion. However, it certainly seems clear that the photogram is not the first instance of a photograph we would think of, and thus not the one from which the properties of the prototypical photograph may be derived. Cf. discussion of Schaeffer in II.4. below!
- 25.
Schaeffer (1987, p. 59 f.) suggests we should distinguish scientific uses of the photogrammatic technique, as those of Fox Talbot, from the abstract compositions of Moholy-Nagy, and the surrealistic-figurative works of Man Ray. However, if the objects are recognizable or not, their presence in the confection of the photograph remains an essential definitional criteria of photograms, and they are thus involved in the sign relations characterizing the photograms as such. Similar shapes may equally be produced by applying some implement directly to the photographic emulsion, but the result is then no photogram.
- 26.
Vanlier’s book is notorious for containing no references to the work of other thinkers in the domain, but it does contain a short appendix, in which the author marks his distances to, among others, Peirce. In particular, our author takes Peirce to task for confusing “l'index” and “l'indice”, and he claims that the interesting things which Peirce says about his “index” really applies to what is ordinarily designated by the term “index” in French. Curiously, Dubois, who is much more of a real Peircean, rejects Vanlier’s distinction offhandedly, but Schaeffer, who also claims to follow Peirce, adopts a favourable stance to it.
- 27.
There are two types of such “indices”, but their difference never becomes very clear, at least not to me:
“Les indices ne sont pas des signes, ce sont des effets physiques d'une cause qui signalent physiquement cette cause, soit par monstration, comme l'empreinte de la patte du sanglier montre cette patte, soit par démonstration, quand un déplacement insolite d'objets démontre au détective le passage d'un voleur.” (Vanlier 1983, p. 22 f.)
No doubt, the mark left by the horn of the wild boar is an imprint, resulting from abrasion in a very straightforward sense, but the modified arrangement of objects in a room, which is one of these trifles which were so informative to Sherlock Holmes and William of Baskerville, can perhaps only be decoded once the relationship between a number of perceptual units have been scrutinized, and employing a much richer encyclopaedia, but it is not obvious that this is the distinction which interests Vanlier. In any case, in Sonesson 1989a,60 ff., I have discussed a few cases from the work of the ethologists Ennion and Tinbergen, which would seem to bridge the gap between these two types of abrasion.
- 28.
To term certain signs “indicators” is, obviously, to make a categorization of signs on the basis of their functions, as seen in relationship to the overall scenes in which signs are produced. We should not expect this categorization to coincide with the one stemming from Peirce’s classification, which depends on the nature of the relationship between the expression and the referent of the sign (or the content; both are contained in what Peirce’s calls the object, in so far as this by now traditional distinction can be identified with the one made by Peirce between the immediate and the dynamical object). Of course, from this point of view, the term “index” is a misnomer, for although the finger known by this name may function as an index, it is not just that, as I said above. Unfortunately, Peirce certainly confused the two classifications, which explains his use of the term.
- 29.
Incidentally, this may be a case in which the digital version of the record, that is, the variant which is separated into discontinuous units, appears truer to lived reality than the analogous one, in the sense of continuous inscription. Cf. our criticism of the conceptions defended by Goodman and Eco, in Sonesson (1989a, p. 220 ff.).
- 30.
This is a curious thing to say, since there really are no lines in reality, only edges which may be represented by lines, and thus no doubt also by prolonged patches. Cf. our discussion of perceptual psychology in Sonesson (1989a, p. 251) and many later articles.
- 31.
It is certainly true of most commonly made photographs, as Vanlier claims, that they constitute records only of the ultimate state resulting from the cumulated photonic imprints left by different temporal slices in which the object is present to the camera, that is, as Vanlier puts it, that they are defined by the arrival of the last photon. There are, however, certain kinds of photographs, such as “the impartial record of the finish of a horse race”, which are made by a particular camera having no shutter, and which therefore produces a single picture showing the horses distributed in space in the way they were really ordered in time, that is, in the order in which they arrived at the finish line. In fact, to quote Snyder and Allen (1982, p. 77), from which I take this example, “every point in the photograph is the finishing line”. This means that the photograph may be read as a record of different temporal layers, just as the annual rings of a tree; therefore, the property attributed by Vanlier to photography should really be ascribed to a particular kind of camera, which happens to be the most commonly used.
- 32.
Perhaps we should really say that, in this case, the index and the icon would not exhaust the universe of signs which are somehow motivated, for the Peircean “symbol” is anyhow a kind of residue category.
- 33.
In fact, as I recognized in Sonesson (1989a, p. 49 ff.), there is also an abductive aspect to performative signs, since some, comparatively abstract, generalities must be presupposed.
- 34.
In this sense, it is absurd to claim that the photograph “est par nature un object pragmatique, inséparable de sa situation référentielle” (Dubois 1983, p. 93). It is precisely because it is so easily separable from its circumstances of production that the photograph has proved so useful, to the point of creating its own pictorial society in our time. Indeed, unlike the shifter “I”, the photograph of a person may be detached from the scene of its production, and used to identify and characterize the individual in his absence. Cf. in this respect my criticism of Eco’s comparison between the shifter and the mirror, in Sonesson (1989a, p. 284 ff.)—now extended in Sonesson 2003a, b, 2005).
- 35.
Criticizing functional semiology, as instanced in the work of Jeanne Martinet, Hervey (1982, p. 180) points to the somewhat tenuous basis for describing some types of expressions and contents as being arbitrary or non-arbitrary in themselves. Whatever one may think of Martinet’s typology, there is no reason to suspect such a criticism must carry over to the present approach. Although it is true that all signs “select (and in this way ‘create’) the domain of their referents”, such creation is not only more complete in the case of performative indices than in the abductive ones but also made anew each time a token of the sign is produced, whereas in the abductive type, it is intrinsic to the semiotic system.
- 36.
There is another variant of the story, retold by Vasari, according to which a man who saw his own shadow cast on a wall filled in the contours of his body with a chalk. Dubois (p. 123 ff.) rightly observes that this is in fact an impossible thing to do, for in approaching the wall, and in using the hand to move the chalk along the contours, the man causes a continuous series of transformation of the shadow cast by his body. It is an interesting fact, as Dubois remarks, that this dream of being able to make an inscription of oneself in the act of making an inscription is realized by the photographic auto-portrait.
- 37.
There is no reason to believe that Snyder and Allen use the term index here in the technical sense given by Peirce, but it certainly corresponds, in this instance, to the general idea defended by Vanlier, Dubois, and, to a certain extent, Schaeffer.
- 38.
Schaeffer (1987, pp. 87 ff., 105 ff.) takes our background knowledge to be important for our interpretation of photographs also in another way (and more so than in the case of verbal language, which is at least doubtful); it is only because we recognize our grandfather, that we are able to learn from the photograph that he was in the habit of going out fishing. What is involved here, however, is only the necessity of possessing more, and more detailed schemes, in order to be able to interpret pictures, and perceptual reality, at lower intensional levels (cf. Sonesson 1988, 1989b).
- 39.
Prieto uses the term “indice” here, but this has nothing to do with the Peircean index, although the example would suggest so. Actually, “indice” would seem to be the most general term of functional semiotics, corresponding to what I would call “sign”.
- 40.
Schaeffer (1987, pp. 52 ff., 78 ff.) in fact denies intentionality to photographic signs, but he can only do this because he confuses a number of levels. If we expect the interventions on the plate after the shot has been made, there is of course no possibility of conveying local decisions, but there is a host of global decisions which must be made before each photograph is taken, even if the camera is then left to record the scene on its own.
- 41.
It is not at all clear that cinematographic time can be described as generally being iconic. Firstly, montage, of the kinds considered by Metz in his macro-syntagmatics, does away with the uninterrupted flow of natural time. Secondly, and more importantly, time is hardly ever the subject of filmic signs, but rather something, which accompanies the action sequence as well as the projection, without being directly signified. On the other hand, some montage types do serve to represent time, but that is exactly were similarity wears off!
- 42.
In this respect, it is interesting to note that Schaeffer, without referring to Lessing or the Laocoon tradition, conceives of the problem in identical psychological terms, but opts for another solution: in his view, it is the picture of the climactic moment which should be chosen, because it points both forwards and backwards with the uttermost tension (p. 143).
- 43.
It should be noted, however, that this is only true of photography as it is commonly used, although this is a use which is built into most cameras; it would not apply, for instance, to that picture of the horses arriving at the end of the race, mentioned by Snyder and Allen, and commented upon in note 32 above.
- 44.
Here, as always, there is of course the problem of knowing how far we may go in excluding “tricks”, without thereby pleading for some particular conception of what photography should be like.
- 45.
That is to say, verbal signs are omnitemporal when considered as types; however, each time they are instantiated in a concrete situation, they appear as token, or replica, as Peirce would have said, and then they carry additional meanings as tokens. Of course, each hoof print may also be considered as a token, the type of which is the general idea of a horseshoe, or a particular horseshoe (of a particular leg of a particular horse). Nevertheless, the difference remains, for in the case of the trace, the essential information is conveyed by the particular imprinting of the horseshoe, at a particular occasion.
- 46.
Therefore, Schaeffer (p. 57 f.) makes too much of the undoubtedly authentically Peircean idea that the photograph, as an index, is a sign of existence, while other pictures, because of being icons, are signs of essence. As I pointed out when criticizing Dubois’s idea of the photograph as being an indicator, the photograph does not in any sense designate the locus of its production.
- 47.
What then about the case of temporal coincidence, without a spatial one? An example would no doubt be television as imagined by Eco (2000), that is, as direct transmission. A better example might be surveillance cameras.
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Sonesson, G. (2015). Semiotics of Photography: The State of the Art. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) International Handbook of Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_19
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