Roland Barthes

(November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. (Semiotics being the study signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.) Barthes' work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, and post-structuralism.
Semiotics and myth
Barthes' many monthly contributions that made up Mythologies (1957) would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance, portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or significations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage - wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo.

In The Fashion System Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a ‘blouse’ is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be interchangeable with ‘skirt’, ‘vest’ or any number of combinations. In the end Barthes' Mythologies became absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art.

The loss of his mother who had raised and cared for him was a terrible blow to Barthes. He had often written works of theory on photography, dating back as far as his individual works in Mythologies. His last great work was Camera Lucida. The text, which was a meditation on an old picture of his mother, was half a theory of communication through the photographic medium and half an act of grief to his mother’s memory. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").

In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

The photograph's reality, aside from all the messages it can be loaded with, might constitute an avant-garde value; not a message as such, aimed at the viewer/reader, but another kind of meaning, which arises almost accidentally, yet without being simply 'the material' or 'the accidental;' this is the eponymous third meaning.

Roland Barthes died less than three years after his mother. On 25 February 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by François Mitterrand (who would be elected president of France the next year), Barthes was struck by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He succumbed to his injuries a month later and died on 25 March.”
from Word Lingo

What signs and symbols will you use to construct meaning in your work?

What juxtapositions of objects and images and even text will help you communicate your message in your work?