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Fernande Saint-Martin, Semiotics of Visual Language, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990. A translation of Sémiologie du Langage Visuel, Quebec, Presses de l'Université du Quebec, 1987. Pp. 255.
Göran Sonesson, Pictorial Concepts. Inquiries into the Semiotic Heritage and its Relevance to the Analysis of the Visual World, Lund, Sweden, Lund University Press, 1989. Pp. 368. Distributed by Chartwell-Bratt Ltd.
Roland Barthes's famous articles on popular photographs of the early 6os (1961; 1964) were among the first to systematically apply semiotic theory to pictorial analysis. While Barthes's work became widely recognized in the English-speaking world, subsequent European research in pictorial semiotics has remained relatively unknown. Meanwhile, the research in this area consolidated into a field of its own. In 1989, the International Association for Visual Semiotics was founded in Blois, France and its first Congress was held in November of 1990. Both Fernande Saint-Martin and Göran Sonesson are among the founders of the Association and the recent publication of their books finally allows English-speaking readers to familiarize themselves with the three decades of research in this field devoted to the study of the mechanisms of pictorial signification.
I will first summarize the Sonesson's and Saint-Martin's arguments. Next I will analyze the general assumptions shared by the pictorial semioticians and point to the limitations of the existing paradigm.
Göran Sonesson
While Saint-Martin's text is a presentation of her own theory, Sonesson's Pictorial Concepts is first of all a critical and a comprehensive evaluation of the field, making it invaluable as a reference. Sonesson, however, does not limit his inquiry to pictorial semiotics per se but brings into discussion the relevant concepts and theories from other disciplines. In fact, by calling his book Pictorial Concepts rather than "Pictorial Semiotics" Sonesson emphasizes that semioticians are not unique in posing questions about the nature of the pictorial sign and that authors in many other fields, such as philosophy or psychology of perception, asked similar questions without resorting to semiotic terms.
Sonesson correlates the key semiotic concepts with the analogous concepts of other disciplines, such as cognitive psychology and phenomenology. Moreover, since even within semiotics different authors employed incompatible terminology to refer to similar phenomena, Sonesson "translates" among the theories of Umberto Eco, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Louis Hjelmslev, Charles Sanders...