Signs in the Production of Media Meaning: Photography of the Sacred Defense from the Perspective of Social Semiotics

Photography as an effective media in expressing social facts and raising the level of collective consciousness has effective narrative and conceptual roles. The photographs of the Iran-Iraq war are implicit texts of discourse factors, social and cognitive components, including socio-cultural value systems. In this research, the authors try to use the theoretical concepts in discourse semiotics as an efficient method to investigate and understand how signs work in the service of producing meaning, as well as developing a coherent and systematic model for extracting and interpreting existing information. Examine the holy defense in the photos. The purpose of the research is to answer these questions: what patterns do the representational, interactive and combined structures of the holy defense photos follow, and how do these three structures show the role of photos in representing the concept of holy defense? The research method . The analyzed photographs were selected from the works of Alfred Yaqoubzadeh, a photographer of the imposed war, because of their narrative characteristics. The findings showed thaphotographs are full of narrative and conceptual symbolic resources, have discourse-oriented structures and hidden ideology, which play an effective role in the formation of interactions in the social, political and cultural fields.