Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes

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The image and the message

Decoding “Italianicity”

Reading the Image

Advertising photography: a coding and decoding process

The complete text (English version)

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It is to Roland Barthes that we owe the notion of “Rhetoric of the Image”. Rhetoric is the “technique of using the means of expression to persuade”. The hallmark of all rhetoric is that it involves at least two levels of language, the proper or denoted and the figurative or connoted. Analyzing images means going through semiology – through the study of signs – a science owed to the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, later taken up by Roland Barthes, notably in his now famous study of Panzani advertising, written in 1964. Here’s a Panzani ad: pasta packets, a box, a bag, tomatoes, a mushroom, all coming out of a half-open net, in yellow and green hues on a red background.

Rhetoric of the Image: the Panzani’s pasta picture

The image and the message

The image immediately gives us a first message, the substance of which is linguistic: the supports are the legend, marginal, and the labels, which are inserted in the naturalness of the scene: the code from which this message is taken is none other than that of the French language; to be deciphered, this message requires no other knowledge than the knowledge of writing and French. To tell the truth, this message can still be decomposed, because the Panzani sign does not only deliver the name of the firm, but also, by its assonance, an additional signifier which is, if you like, “italianicity”. First of all (this order is indifferent, because these signs are not linear), here is the idea that in the scene represented, it is a question of a return to the market; this signified implies two euphoric values: that of the freshness of the products and that of the purely domestic preparation for which they are intended; its signifier is the half-open net that lets the provisions spread out on the table, as if “when unpacked”.

Decoding “Italianicity”

To read this first sign, all that is needed is a kind of knowledge that is somehow implanted in the customs of a very broad civilization, where “doing one’s own market” is opposed to the expeditious supply of a more “mechanical” civilization. A second sign is almost as obvious; its signifier is the combination of the tomato, the bell pepper and the tricolor tint of the poster; its signifier is Italy, or rather Italianicity; this sign is in a redundant relationship with the connoted sign of the linguistic message (the Italian assonance of the name Panzani); the knowledge mobilized by this sign is already more particular: it is a knowledge that is properly “French” […] based on a knowledge of linguistic stereotypes. Continuing to explore the image (which does not mean that it is entirely clear at first glance), one easily discovers at least two other signs; in one, the tight gathering of different objects conveys the idea of a total culinary service, as if on the one hand Panzani provided everything necessary for a composed dish, and as if on the other hand the concentrate of the box equalled the natural products surrounding it, the scene bridging in some way the origin of the products and their last state; in the other sign, the composition, evoking the memory of so many food paintings, refers to an aesthetic meaning : It is the “still life” or, as it is better said in other languages, the “still life”; the necessary knowledge here is strongly cultural”. Roland Barthes wrote, several years latter, in 1980, one of the most popular books in aesthetics of photography: Camera Lucida.

Reading the Image

Barthes “reads” the image, in a process that has a beginning and an end, he unseals the objects present in the image, he lets nothing escape in an absolutely analytical approach. We describe the image for once, then we move on to something else, the image is already described. The senses are thus approached in a form of transparency (here, we are talking about the sense of seeing), the eyes serve the intellect, and once the intellectual categorizations have been made, it is at the level of analysis that the issue is at stake. Barthes thus identifies the signs that can be seen in the image. “Italianicity” can be deduced from the objects present in the image, but there is also a “literal” message which, Barthes says, is to be found in the letter of the image, and which is therefore opposed to the “symbolic” message, which is also contained in the image. It is a question of a “satisfactory reading”, which reveals three messages: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message and an uncoded iconic message. The iconic message and the “perceptive” message must be differentiated in an analysis that would be “right”, in Barthes’ words. The analysis is “right” when it succeeds in explaining the role of the image in society.

Advertising photography: a coding and decoding process

This flattening of the vision that Barthes operates, seems to disregard feelings and states of consciousness during perception, it is a senseless vision, a cerebral vision, which exhausts the image understood as an accumulation of signs. It is a mistake to call this a rhetoric of the image in general, but it may be relevant to associate these encoding/decoding mechanisms with the advertising image, which is carefully “calculated”. The photographers who produce these advertising images know this very well: each image is a project, which requires planning, economic and material resources, and considerable time until the desired image is produced. And “building” the perfect image becomes even more difficult when it comes to food, because our eyes are very sensitive to it. But is this analytical decoding of Roland Barthes the matter of any image: of all photographs, paintings, drawings… etc? There is a descriptive tradition in Art History that goes in this direction: there are even methods of “reading” images, which students are taught and which can be very prolific, but nothing replaces the ” bare ” eye, the sensitive look, the look that does not pass through the intellect.

This way of seeing is more capricious, less obvious, it is not susceptible to analytical decoding, and it is not this view that Barthes is talking about when he refers to a rhetoric of images. But if we return again to the advertising image (Barthes’ real subject), we cannot but admit that Barthes’ analysis reveals the complexities of these instrumentalized images, and reveals the mechanisms that produce and transform them into the visual vehicles of a commercial message. It is impossible to return to the innocent eye after reading this brilliant essay by Barthes.

The complete text (English version)

Find here the complete text or Roland Barthes here: Rhetoric of Images, Roland Barthes, PDF