018 · Meaning

01 Jul, 2026

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I was interested in Photography only for “sentimental” reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.¹

In his essay ‘The Third Meaning’, French literary theorist Roland Barthes demonstrates at least three approaches to ‘reading’ photographs. The first is the denotation: the obvious meaning, the literal acknowledgement of what is seen. The second is connotation: symbolic meaning, the association of what we see with embedded codes and conventions. The connotative reading is suggestive and symbolic. It relies on the observer’s ability to decode signs according to cultural and national paradigms.

The third meaning evades classification. It is a ‘poetical grasp.’² It is a ‘signifier without a signified.’³ For Barthes, the third meaning is obtuse. It is the ‘supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing’⁴ and the point ‘where articulated language is no more than approximative and where another language begins.’⁵

English art critic John Berger refers to this new language as a ‘half-language.’⁶ What is depicted in a photograph is not meaning in itself. Meaning needs to be extrapolated, drawn out from the appearance. ‘Appearances in themselves are oracular.’⁷ Like oracles, their meaning can be obtuse, vague, or profound, but it is always personal. It provides a constructed basis for the spectator’s projections.

Berger, like Barthes, recognises that some of this reading uses structural semiology, but both insist that structural mechanics are insufficient. There is always an inherently personal meaning that evades the structural symbolic order. With this ‘half-language,’ appearances deliver only half of what will be read. The other half depends on the self’s projection into the image.