018 · Meaning

01 Jul, 2026

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As Spectator 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 ‘The Third Meaning’, Roland Barthes distinguishes three levels of meaning in stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s films. The first is informational. It gathers what can be learnt from the setting, costumes, characters, their relationships, and their place within a recognisable narrative. Barthes calls this the level of communication. The second is symbolic. It draws on referential, diegetic, historical, and specifically Eisensteinian codes. This is the level of signification.²

The third meaning evades classification. It compels what Barthes calls a ‘poetical’ grasp.³ The obtuse meaning is a ‘signifier without a signified’.⁴ It is the ‘supplement that my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing’⁵ and belongs to the region ‘where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins’.⁶

John Berger develops a separate account of photographic meaning. For Berger, ‘appearances in themselves are oracular’.⁷ They insinuate beyond the phenomena they present, though they rarely establish an indisputable reading. What the spectator sees emerges from both the appearances and the search brought to them. Appearances remain ‘a half-language’.⁸

Barthes and Berger meet at the limits of structural explanation. Barthes places the obtuse meaning outside the codes of communication and signification. Berger describes a reading formed between appearances and the spectator’s search.

For my practice, this unresolved space is where photo-sketching begins.⁹ The photograph offers appearances without settling their meaning. Writing follows the search through memory, association, projection, and invention. Meaning develops between image and text.