Image - Text

An example of a portrait from Photo Wallahs (1991) documentary

“The text does not "gloss" the images, which do not "illustrate" the text. For me, each has been no more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty, analogous perhaps to that loss of meaning Zen calls a satori. Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read the retreat of signs”. – In the opening of his book Empire of Signs (1982) Roland Barthes expressed his admiration with a special kind of relationships that can emerge between an image and text. We can find the similar attitude in his Camera Lucida (1981), where the key photograph which received the most of explanations remained unshown to the reader, while all other pictures (shown and recognizable) were accompanied with highly subjective commentaries (Barthes’s attempts to verbalize his punctums) that turned out to be absolutely useless for the reader (somebody’s punctum can hardly be meaningful to me).

This delicate relationship between image and text seems to be something more than an anchorage and a relay, Barthes’s early structuralist concepts. An anchorage is a caption that helps to stop the 'floating chain' of signifieds: “Shown a plateful of something (in an Amieux advertisement), I may hesitate in identifying the forms and masses; the caption ('rice and tuna fish with mushrooms') helps me to choose the correct level of perception, permits me to focus not simply my gaze but also my understanding” (Barthes, 1977, 39). A relay means that text and image stand in a complementary relationship as equal parts of the general syntagm.

In his analysis of photographic essays (including Bathes’s one) Mitchell continues the same kind of exploration – how an image and language can be connected. The idea is to go beyond a banal illustration, doubling, literal, direct connection. How to build narration by the visual narration as such? Mitchell talks about an essay as something by definition personal and incomplete (Mitchell 1994, 289), and thus a photographic essay shouldn’t bear the burden of a “comprehensive” representation. But how a picture can narrate? What are building blocks of visual narration? I am thinking now about the role of metaphor and the signs that bear explicit cultural connotations as the elements of narration. The portraits in Photo Wallahs films can be read not just appearances but as stories that people and photographers wanted to tell.

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text: Essays. London: Fontana.
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Barthes, Roland. 1982. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.