Investigating the Social World through Photography

Abstract

Visual representations found in the written press are approached through a social semiotic analysis that explores the way in which the nonverbal speech is handled at visual level and examines the notion of stereotypy in visual representation. Analyzing the basic structure of images, a structure comprising coded messages, reveals a conventional representation of mass media images. The display method is a simplistic and standardized one, achieving an outline of a world of values which is rather made up and of poor content. Thus, there is the assumption that the representations of written publications enforce and reflect distorted perspectives of the reality, and the ones generating them are in their turn subject to conformism by the organizational framework they serve.