Such emphasis on the malleability of the human
individual reinforces the ‘‘death of the author’’
understanding of text and image interpretation
championed by Roland Barthes. We have seen
how the traditional, modernist understanding of
art assumes the existence of a fixed author or artist
whose function it is to encode their determinate
ideas or emotions in the artworks they create. This
same model implicitly assumes that it is the function
of the audience and the critic to decode the art-
works, and thereby come to understand their deter-
minate, embodied meanings. Barthes, however,
denies both of these traditional assumptions, repla-
cing them with an understanding according to which
the audience or critic imposes a plurality of ever-
shifting meanings on artworks, unconstrained by
the assumption of a stable author with determinate
communicative intentions. In the extreme these lines
of thought lead theorists such as Andy Grundberg
and Jean Baudrillard to entertain the idea that social
reality itself is merely the sum total of the mass-
media imagery with which members of society are
continually confronted. In this extreme photo-
graphic images are seen, not as representations of
an image-independent world lying beyond them, but
rather as constitutive of social reality itself. Images
are regarded as ‘‘simulacra,’’ that is, as ‘‘copies’’ that
lack originals, a view which precipitates in ontology
what Grundberg calls a ‘‘crisis of the real.’’
Questions About Photographic Meaning
Prior to the 1960s the meaningfulness of social-
documentary photographs was regarded as a sim-
ple matter of what was before the camera at the
moment of exposure. A photograph of a child
laboring in a factory, for example, simply docu-
mented a certain occurrence at a certain place and
time. Such straightforward meaning could be used
for larger purposes—as a means, say, toward the
abolition of child-labor practices—but the meaning
itself remained simple and literal. With the onset of
the academic period, however, structuralism in lin-
guistics began to influence the understanding of
image meaning, altering it dramatically.
Structuralism is a theory about the nature of
word meaning, a theory which is in many respects
at odds with common sense. On the commonsense
understanding, words have as their meanings the
things to which they refer. ‘‘Paris,’’ for example,
has its meaning exhausted by the fact that it is used
by English speakers to refer to the place, Paris.
According to structuralist theorists such as the
late nineteenth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saus-
sure, however, the word meanings have less to do
with the extra-linguistic objects to which the words
are conventionally used to refer, and more to do
with the roles words have in relation to other words
in the language of which they are a part. In the
same way that a chess piece derives its meaning, not
from anything it refers to, but rather from its role
in relation to the other pieces on the board, on the
Saussurian understanding of language a word such
as ‘‘Paris’’ derives its meaning, not so much from
the fact that it refers to the place Paris, but rather
more from its use in relation to other words in the
language being spoken. For structuralists, word
meaning has more to do with the roles words play
in a game of language than with how they function
to refer to items in an extra-linguistic reality.
The connection between structuralism in linguis-
tics and image-meaning in photographic theory
comes when it is assumed that photographic images
are like words. Once this assumption is made, it is
open to a theorist with structuralist inclinations to
view photographic meaning as being less a product
of what was before the camera at the moment of
exposure, and more a product of the relation of the
photographic image to all other photographic
images in the ‘‘visual language’’ of the media.
Such an understanding is well illustrated in the
work of the ‘‘appropriationist’’ photographer Sher-
rie Levine. In the late 1970s Levine made a series of
simple photographic copies of modernist classics
such as Walker Evans’s images of sharecropper
families, and then displayed them on gallery walls
under her own name. Whereas the meanings of the
original Evans images involve reference to share-
cropper families, the meanings of the nearly indis-
cernible Levine prints have little if anything to do
with the with what the images literally depict, and
instead much to do with questions of originality,
ownership, and ‘‘aura’’ (see the above discussion of
Benjamin) that arise out of the fact that the Levine
print is a copy of the Evans print. In this way the
meanings of the Levine prints derive from their
relations to other prints, and not from their rela-
tions to any extra-imagistic world.
This structuralist understanding of image mean-
ing can be pushed to the ‘‘post-structuralist’’ limits
where image-meaning becomes never a simple mat-
ter of what was in front of the camera at the
moment of exposure, and instead always a product
of the place of the image in the web of other images
that are its historical antecedents. Such a post-
structuralist view mixes well with the extreme onto-
logical view mentioned above insofar as there is
little point in analyzing image-meaning in terms
of reference to an extra-imagistic world if one
denies the existence of such a world. It is for suchPHOTOGRAPHIC THEORY