From Semiotics to Deconstruction of Photography

This paper consists of two parts. First, I will propose certain assumptions regarding semiotics in order to introduce it as a reading method within the structuralist approach. Then, after explaining two distinct types of photography and different “looks” in photography, the main reading strategies of semiotics such as paradigmatic/syntagmatic, binary opposition, narrative, movement, and denotation/connotation will be put forward. In the second part, with certain references to Roland Barthes’s theories, it will be explained how deconstructive reading has certain affinities with poststructuralist semiotics. Through readings of Barthes’s writings on photography, I will explain a shift from the structuralist approach to a deconstructive one in his very last work, Camera Lucida. In this part, the notions of absence, death, indeterminacy, parergon, intertextuality, counter-narrative, polysemy, and finally Barthes’s notions of studium and punctum will be explained. The pictures used for analysis are all taken by Iranian photographers who participated in a photography exhibition at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts in June 2006 entitled Silver Windows: Iranian Contemporary Photographers (A Selection of 17 Visions).