photographer and the viewer that are intimately
implicated in the photograph’s meaning. Today, a
semiotics of photography is often a social semiotics
that combines textual analysis with attempts to take
into account the ideological implications as well as
the biographical and cultural experiences that are
inscribed within the performance of the photo-
graphic utterance. In exploring the processes
whereby meaning is negotiated, the semiotics of
photography focus more and more on questions of
context and reception; the problematics of author-
ship and interpretation; the interrelation of photo-
graphic image, experience, and comprehension; and
the role of cultural codes of recognition, represen-
tation, and iconography in the creation and under-
standing of photographic meaning.
NancyPedriSeealso:Appropriation; Barthes, Roland; Berger,
John; Burgin, Victor; Conceptual Photography;
Deconstruction; Flusser, Vilem; Interpretation
Further Reading
Barthes, Roland.La Chambre claire. Note sur la photogra-
phie. Paris: Seuil, 1980; asCamera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
———. ‘‘Le Message photographique.’’Communicationsno.
1 (1961); as ‘‘The Photographic Message.’’ InThe Respon-
sibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Repre-
sentation. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985.
———. ‘‘Rhe ́torique de l’image.’’Communicationsno. 4
(1964); as ‘‘Rhetoric of the Image.’’ InImage, Music,
Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. London:
Montana Press, 1977.
Burgin, Victor. ‘‘Looking at Photographs.’’Screen Educa-
tionno. 24 (1977).
Carani, Marie. ‘‘Dire Peirce. Dire la trichotomie. Dire la
photographie.’’Trois3, no. 3, (printemps-e ́te ́1988).
Eco, Umberto. ‘‘A Photograph.’’ InFaith in Fakes. Lon-
don: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
Lindekens, Rene ́.Ele ́ments pour une se ́miotique de la photo-
graphie. Paris: Didier, 1971.
———. ‘‘Se ́miotique de la photographie.’’ InA Semiotic
Landscape. Edited by Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco,
and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg. The Hague: Mouton,
1979.
Lomax, Yve.Writing the Image. London: Taurus, 2000.
McLean, William. ‘‘Propositions for a Semiotical Defini-
tion of the Photograph.’’Versusno. 6 (Sept.–Dec. 1973).
Sekula, Allan. ‘‘Reading an Archive: Photography between
Labour and Capital.’’ In Photography/Politics Two.
Edited by Patricia Holland, Jo Spence, and Simon Wat-
ney, London: Comedia, 1986.ANDRES SERRANO
American
Andres Serrano uses photography to address basic
human issues such as life, death, religion, race,
violence, corporeality, and sexuality. His work
has provoked controversy and has elicited charges
of obscenity and blasphemy. Despite the contro-
versy (or perhaps due to it), Serrano has become
one of America’s most important photographic
artists, exhibiting his large-format color photo-
graphs all over the world.
Serrano was born in New York City in 1950 to
an Afro-Cuban mother and a Honduran father. He
entered the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1967,
but left in 1969, battling drug dependency. In the
1980s, after a hiatus of several years, Serrano began
showing his art in New York City. As a lapsed
Catholic, religion plays a significant role in his
work. For the past 25 years, Serrano has explored
what he calls his ‘‘obsessions’’ with Catholic ima-
gery. Serrano is also interested in the figure of the
outcast because, he claims, as a non-white Amer-
ican he identifies with the underdog.
While biography has influenced Serrano’s work,
he is also deeply engaged with the history of art.
Serrano’s early work was influenced by Surrealism,
which he took up again in a later series,The Inter-
pretation of Dreams, 2000. Other images, such as
those inThe Morgue Series, recall seventeenth-cen-
tury painter Caravaggio’s work, or the many Ba-
roque and Renaissance paintings of the dead Christ.
Serrano presents his viewers with an aesthetic that is
at once beautiful and horrible, troubling and seduc-
tive. He has also done striking abstract photographs
of unbroken expanses of milk, or blood, evoking
Color Field paintings of the 1960s and 1970s.SERRANO, ANDRES