One Thousand Words

Roland Barthes described in his article “Rhetoric of the Image” that there are quite a few things to take into consideration with images. In the section titled The Three Messages, Barthes talks about a Panzani advertisement and how a caption can be important. Because an advertisement can be viewed from such a wide variety of people, it has to have a range of possible interpretations.

Barthes splits the three messages into the linguistic message and iconic messages. He asks if the linguistic message is constant. In fact he even goes as far to ask the question if there is “always textual matter in, under, or around the image” (36). Barthes argues that in today’s mass communications world, linguistic messages do appear to be present in every image. So, it is not very accurate to say that there is a civilization of the image.

I found this to be a very interesting concept to I looked into it myself. I’m a resident assistant so I have access to many old magazines that are meant to be used for publicity and programming. I went to the box of magazines and started to look through the images. After flipping through three or four I began to agree with Barthes on this matter. Every picture of a woman had some sort of text or caption selling the lipstick or clothes she was wearing. Each ad had phone numbers or a brief summary of the product it was selling. Not even the cover can be a picture by itself. Though an image of a model may be what first holds a spectator’s view, in the end people are interested in the article headings.

So what do we make of this then? Is there anything to even be concerned about? I would like to argue no. Images may have the reputation of being able to express one-thousand words but what is a few more? Some people need a source of direction and the images found in magazines provide that. It is one thing to just throw a bunch of random pictures at someone but another to explain it and make sense of it.