Sign Structure of the Photography and Its Sociocultural Borders
Photography is a structurally organized text, containing three kinds of sign systems instantaneously. A combination of these makes up a potentially complex dynamic system. The authors of the article claim that, depending on the language situation and the social needs, photography actualizes one of the three kinds of signification, either iconic, or index, or symbolic, thus creating three kinds of photography communication, such as objective, rhetorical or artistic one. The most valuable feature of the objective photography, based on iconic signification, is the realism of the photo image, which vastly broadens its epistemic potential. The rhetoric photography, which mainly involves the index component of a photograph, is estimated according to its so called “evidence” potential representing the existing photo image in “now” and “here” categories. What we appreciate in artistic photography most of all is its symbolic origin making a photo image uncertain and incomplete and therefore multimeaningful. The main way to introduce symbolism into photography is restructuring a photo image. We see that the photography space taken existentially is significantly reduced. On the one hand, the restrictions of photography come to an end if the iconic character of a photo image starts to dominate turning it into a virtual phantom. As a result, it is deprived of the specific sociocultural functions acquiring the functions of an advanced technical attraction. The key feature for characterizing an object as a photograph now is a material surface of a photo image, such as screen, paper, glass and so on. On the other hand, the cultural and aesthetic area of photography is getting dim because of intensive conditional and symbolical significance which transforms a photo image into a traditional type of pictorialism, e.g. painting, graphics, a water color, graphic design, etc. From this angle, the key feature of a photo image, as we see it, is the internal plastic texture, which means a combination of fine details on photos proving the obvious photographic representation.