How do we decode the things we see? For one of my university essays, I have been reading up on Erwin Panofsky's theory of iconography, the semiotics of images, and how we decode the images we see almost instantaneously, without even thinking about what we are doing.
In Panofsky's theory, he relates iconography to gesture, in particular the tip of a hat when walking past someone you know as a greeting. The person to whom the hat is tipped recognises this as a greeting, a polite gesture, and in order for them to understand the meaning they would've had to exist in the same cultural and social context. Yet we don't even think about how we interpret the things we see. Another example, as in the book 'Practices of Looking' by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, is road signs. If we think about road signs, we interpret them quickly and easily, and pretty fast we understand them and don't think twice when we see them. The same relates to images, for example, if I were to show you the image below, you would instantly connect that to the Olympics. Both the symbol of the rings and the word 'Olympics' represent the event, that's semiotics for you.
Although Panofsky's theory is meant for artworks from the Renaissance, lets interpret the Olympic rings using it.
Breaking down interpretation or meaning:
1) Primary or Natural
- I recognise the shapes and colours
2) Secondary or Conventional
- I recognise the symbol as representation of the Olympics, I recognise the cultural context
- I recognise that the rings mean the 5 competitive continents and the colours (including white) represent the colours of the flags of all competing countries
3) Intrinsic meaning
- The symbol tells us the about the cultural context it was created in
- An age of sport and competition
- The symbol was created only 100 years ago, so the symbol was created in a fairly contemporary age
