Page 106 - Culture Society and the Media

96 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
Italianness reinforced by the Italian assonance of the Italian name, Panzani; to
the assembly of different objects which suggest the idea of a whole culinary
service and in which Panzani tins are equated with the natural products
surrounding them; and finally to the aesthetic signified of still life. Barthes
identifies three messages in the Panzani advertisement; a linguistic message, a
coded iconic message and an uncoded iconic message. He suggests that one way
of approaching the apparently uncoded message, that is, the literal image of the
photograph, is to start with the linguistic message, then examine the literal image
and finally examine the overall symbolic meaning of the message. This method
of dealing with the uncoded iconic message (the literal image, the photograph)
Barthes calls denotation while the analysis of the coded iconic message (the
overall symbolic meaning of the advertisement) Barthes calls connotation.
Clearly these modes of analysis are only analytically distinct in that there is no way
to read a ‘literal image’ neutrally, which is not in some way dependent on coding
and cultural conventions.
The distinguishing feature of Barthes’ formal readings of advertisements and
other media messages is the identification of second-order meanings, meanings
beyond those initially noted. In the case of the example from Elle, the connection
between women, novels and children in the message signifies that women are
only allowed to write if they have children—but it also goes beyond this in terms
of the second-order meaning, whereby the complex of pictures and words and
their meaning come to constitute a signifier for the idea that it is the natural place
of women to produce children even if they also produce novels. Film and
photography, Barthes suggests, operate upon us in a manner which suppresses
and conceals their ideological function because they appear to record rather than
to transform or signify. Hall uses this kind of analysis to establish the ideological
character of news photographs:

New photos operate under a hidden sign marked ‘this really happened, see
for yourself’. Of course the choice of this moment of an event as against
that, of this person rather than that, of this angle rather than any other,
indeed the selection of this photographed incident to represent a whole
complex chain of events and meanings is a highly ideological procedure. But
by appearing literally to produce the event as it really happened news
photos repress their selective/interpretive/ideological function. They seek a
warrant in that ever-pre-given neutral structure, which is beyond question,
beyond interpretation: the ‘real’ world. At this level, news photos not only
support the credibility of the newspaper as an accurate medium. They also
guarantee and underwrite its objectivity (that is they neutralize its
ideological function). (Hall, 1972, p. 84)

The analysis of news photographs is obviously very similar to that of Barthes but
it perhaps registers more acutely because the conventions of news-reporting rely
heavily on accepted canons of impartiality. Newsreporting presents itself as a