A picture is a message. Take the press photograph as an instance. “ Considered overall this message is formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission is the staff of the newspaper, the group of technicians certain of whom take the photo, some of whom choose, compose and treat it, while others, finally, give it a title, a caption, and a commentary. The point of reception is the public which reads the paper.” ( Roland Barthes, 1977 ) It illustrates the information conveyed in the photograph: where it comes from, who make it and who can see it. These are superficial information. What the makers want to express indeed is the denoted meanings in the pictures, including the photograph and drawing.
However, in my point of view, we shouldn’t fixed with only one meaning cause different people perceive different meanings and feelings in the same picture. A kind of quiz related to pictures is popular in recent years, in which you tell what you can see in an abstract or complicated picture and it shows your psychology and personality. We look at the same picture but see different things. Another example is two photos of pink and white shoes and a white and gold dress which have been relayed for many times on facebook. While hundred of people said what they saw were gray and mint green shoes and blue and black dress. What we can see depends on many factors such as lighting, phone/computer screen display, brains interpretation and type of sight. Some photographers have attributed the reason to white balance, which means ‘the action of removing color casts from a photo so that an object that is physically white, appress white in the photo’(https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/12/why-do-people-see-different-colours-why-do-we-see-the-shoe-and-the-dress-differently-6994997/). No matter what reasons, it can’t be denied that we can see different things in the same picture.
Reference
Barthes, R., & Heath, Stephen. (1977). Image, music, text (Fontana communications series). London]: Fotana.
By Shuangjiao Guan
MCS Group One 