The Layers of Meaning

Photography often begins with clarity. A subject. A frame. A moment of light. Decisions are made — what to include, what to exclude, where the eye should enter and where it should rest. At first glance, the photograph seems simple—a record.

In Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes describes the image not as a single message but as a layered construction. First, there is the linguistic message — the caption, the title, and the written words that anchor the image. Then comes the coded iconic message, where symbols and cultural references inform how we interpret what we see. And beneath it all lies the non-coded iconic message — the purely visual information, untouched by interpretation. Or so it seems.

What Barthes makes clear is that even what feels most objective — what we see — is shaped by history, context, and expectation. The image does not speak in a single voice. It carries many.

Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, takes another step. The camera itself, he argues, is not a passive instrument. It is a programmed apparatus — a machine built with intentions, assumptions, and limits. To photograph is not just to see or capture but to play within the structure that the camera allows. The photographer chooses within a system that has already made some choices in advance.

Under this lens, photography becomes a dialogue between human and machine, vision and code. The resulting image is not simply what was in front of the lens but what could be made visible within those rules — and how those rules were quietly bent, followed, or resisted.

Together, these texts challenge the idea that photography is ever neutral or self-explanatory. Even in the most minimal frame — a faint landscape, a stretch of light, a single object — there is interpretation. And so, meaning in photography is never fixed. It shifts with the viewer. It moves with time. A photograph seen today is not the same photograph seen tomorrow. The visual surface stays still, but the reading changes. It opens. The greatest strength of photography as a medium is not offering answers but creating space for interpretation and uncertainty.

Barthes, Roland, (1977) "Rhetoric of the Image" from Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text pp.32-51

Flusser, Vilém (1984). Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books.