Social Semiotics

Visual Social Semiotics: Understanding How Still Images Make Meaning This last post is on Social Semiotics, which is a method of analyzing situations with context to infer their underlying meanings. One way this can be applied is with images, and when a picture is worth a thousand words, there's a lot it could potentially be saying. Social Semiotics would be a way of determining that meaning. With images specifically in mind, a lot of development for the methodology was done by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Social Semiotics examines how signs and symbols, including visual elements, contribute to communication, and can help us better understand how specific contexts influence a situation. 

There are some guidelines to Social Semiotics that help us understand and utilize the methodology. People see things in the context of their environment and provide meanings behind those objects. This is especially true if we look at composition. As an example, the placement of a photo or the angle of its subject can convey difference messages. An image above others or text signifies its importance, whereas an image at the bottom of the page is shown to be of lesser importance. An image placed between text may add context to the previous paragraph, or catch users onto the next. In a photo, something positioned to look enlarged or prominent shows its superiority or majesty. Or it may be more secluded, to more secretly include the subject and its meaning. 

One of those examples is seen well in the photo above. If you don't recognize it, it's Mount Rainier with a field of lupine in the foreground. The image is meant to display the prominence of the mountain in its natural environment but doesn't miss out on showcasing the beauty of its surroundings as well. 

To provide another example of photo composition, with more of a message of isolation, here is a photo of people in a park. There are many others in the background, but the focus is on the two women in the midground of the photo. They are alone, but they are together. 

While these aren't the deepest and most philosophical examples of interpreting the meaning from photos, I think they provide a good example of how Social Semiotics takes a role in determining the meaning behind visual communications. I got a lot of my information from this article, Visual Social Semiotics: Understanding How Still Images Make Meaning, by Claire Harrison, which provided a lot of context and much deeper explanations of the methodology.