Visual semiotics

Visual semiotics is a sub-domain of semiotics that analyses the way visual images communicate a message.

Studies of meaning evolve from semiotics, a philosophical approach that seeks to interpret messages in terms of signs and patterns of symbolism. Originating in literary and linguistic contexts, the study of semiotics (or semiology in France) has been expanding in a number of directions since the early turn-of-the-century work of Charles Sanders Peirce in the U.S. and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ferdinand Saussure in France.

A sign can be a word, sound, or visual image. Saussure divides a sign into two components: the signifier, which is the sound, image, or word, and the signified, which is the concept or meaning the signifier represents. As Berger points out, the problem of meaning arises from the fact that the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional. In other words, signs can mean anything we agree that they mean, as well as mean different things to different people. Nonverbal signs can produce many complex symbols and hold multiple meanings.

The Belgian Mu Group (Groupe µ) (founded 1967) developed a structural version of visual semiotics, on a cognitive basis, as well as a visual rhetoric.

Most signs operate on several levels—iconic as well as symbolic and/or indexical. This suggests that visual semiotic analysis may be addressing a hierarchy of meaning in addition to categories and components of meaning. As Umberto Eco explains, "what is commonly called a 'message' is in fact a text whose content is a multilevel discourse".

The broadening concept of text and discourse encourages additional research into how visual communication operates to create meaning. Deely explains that "at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs." Semiotics now considers a variety of texts, using Eco's terms, to investigate such diverse areas as movies, art, advertisements, and fashion, as well as visuals. In other words, as Berger explains, "the essential breakthrough of semiology is to take linguistics as a model and apply linguistic concepts to other phenomena--texts--and not just to language itself." Anthropologists like Grant McCracken and marketing experts like Sydney Levy have even used semiotic interpretations to analyze the rich cultural meanings of products and consumer consumption behaviors as texts.

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