Image-Music-Text - Roland Barthes

I have been reading Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes recently and found that it has provided me with an new insight into how people represent themselves. He says that "representation is not defined directly by imitation: even if one gets rid of the notions of the 'real', of the 'vraisemblable', of the 'copy', there will still be representation for so long as a subject (author, reader, spectator, or voyeur) casts his gaze towards a horizon on which he cuts out the base of a triangle, his eye (or in his mind) forming the apex."

In the book he also talks about 'the pose' and what it signifies. "Consider a press photograph of President Kennedy widely distributed at the time of the 1960 election: a half-length profile shot, eyes looking upwards, hands joined together. Here it is the very pose of the subject which prepares the reading of the signifieds of connotation: youthfulness, spirituality, purity. The photograph clearly only signifies because of the existence of a store of stereotyped attitudes which form ready-made elements of signification (eyes raised heavenwards, hands clasped). A 'historical grammar' of iconographic connotation ought thus to look for its material in painting, theatre, associations of ideas, stock metaphors, etc., that is to say, precisely in 'culture'. As it has been said, pose is not a specifically photographic procedure but it is difficult not to mention it insofar as it derives its effect from the analogical principle at the basis of the photograph." This relates to my work as the subjects within it are posing, be it in their own non-directed way. There is evidently a stereotype that all people are guilty of following and letting it influence their style and the way that that we hold ourselves.