Article:

Mythos und Bild. Roland Barthes’ Semiologie bildlicher Stereotypisierung

In the reception of the works of Roland Barthes the dominance of LA CHAMBRE CLAIRE has led to omit two texts that are of paramount importance for investi-gating the production of stereotypes through images. These two texts – THE PHOTOGRAPHIC MESSAGE and THE RHETORICS OF THE IMAGE – analyse this kind of production with analytic and systematic rigour, orienting themselves in a much more obvious way to Barthes’ idea in the 1950s and 1960s of a general semiol-ogy that entails a critical or sociocritical dimension. In this paper I want to in-vestigate into a field of texts that bring together these three different threads in the oeuvre of Barthes: his notion of societal myths and of a scientific mythol-ogy, the project of a general semiology, and his image- and photography-re-lated works. I want to highlight that images have a special function towards the production of social stereotypes that lies in their denotative level. Especially images, more than texts, appear to be an objective depiction of reality, a simple denotation of what ›is‹.