Roland Barthes on Semiotics

Let's start with the Panzani advertisement. It was interesting to me to see everything Barthes picked out from this that I never even gave a second thought.  One layer of the picture tells us someone just went shopping and left everything they bought out on the table.  Everything shown just so happens to be representing the colors of the Italian flag which makes a lot of sense since they are selling spaghetti ingredients.  They are many more layer than just this though, by adding in the fresh produce around these preservative foods we get the sense that it is all fresh, even what's in the can... but when you really stop to think about it we know this can't really be possible.  All part of a marketer's job to trick us.  This small article got me thinking, we should always take a second look to imagery, logos, or ads presented to us and to not just take it all at face value, because there is all sorts of trickery that goes into designing these "still lifes" and photographs.

Now onto the cover of the Paris Match Magazine.  The boy on the cover salutes to a culture that has destroyed his own and this angers Barthes (and myself).  He talks about how myths make history nature which I competely agree with.  This article reminds me of a mythoology class I have taken here at SFSU.  Professor Calkins told us that characters throughout mythology were probably based on real people. Such as Zues, he was probably a real king at one point that was looked to as a God and when stories are passed down so many generations it makes sense that the idea of this man was soon brought into a godly form.  The same thing happens with the way we look at the Presidents of our past here in the United States.  George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, we all think of them as great people who built our nation, but they owned slaves too.  It has been proven that Thomas Jefferson even fathered several children from one of his slaves... but people of this nation idolize our past Presidents and don't want to hear this horrible things about them so they simply don't believe it.  Creating a myth in their minds that these people of the past could do no wrong.  This article also makes me want to really give a second thought to images like this that I see in everyday life.  Semiotics is an important thing to study in this day and age when we have so many thrown into our faces on a daily basis, I'm glad we got to read these to look deeper into these issues.