SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF PHOTOGRAPHY ON COVER ARTWORK OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S ALBUM „DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN“
Keywords:
photography, music album cover artwork, semiotic analysis, rhetoric of photography, connotation procedures, paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysisAbstract
Semiotic analysis of photographic visual messages on music records cover artwork, gives insight into the rhetoric construct made of photography, written text and music with lyrics as constituting parts of music album. This rhetorical construct, which is typical for cover artwork, makes it significantly different from other media of graphic design, thus interesting from angle of semantic component of graphic design. In this paper, connotative procedures and their application on cover artwork are being analyzed. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects od message are analyzed in order to find out how photographic message is being coded by its authors and how is it decoded by recipient.
This particular photo is selected because of its strong denotative component. Photography depicts musician – Bruce Springsteen. But it presents him as one of characters from his songs – typical hard workingmen from the edge of the society. Trough use of connotative procedures such as pose, objects and photogenia and distinctive photographic style of vernacular photography, Stefanko (photographer) and Springsteen have made an object, a photo, which pretends to be authentic personal object. Trough that object, Springsteen is creating also his stage persona or alter ego of poor, hardworking men from the edge of society.
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