Semiotics of photography
the state of the art
pp. 417-483
in: International handbook of semiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
The study of photography has been a fundamental testing case for pictorial semiotics, in part because, being in a sense machine made, photographs would seem to resist the critique of iconicity, and in part because they could be said to involve all the three semiotic grounds, iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, but in different proportions. The present chapter is an overview of the lively discussion that raged over the nature of photography at the end of the last century, notably involving authors such as Vanlier, Dubois, and Schaeffer, who defended the idea that photographs were essentially indexical. It also summarizes the criticism of this stance expressed by the present author, arguing that the photograph must be iconical before it is indexical, and adds some new twists to this criticism, which brings us into general semiotical theory.