Whilst I am enjoying the research and writing, I admit to an increasing unease with some of the academic theories of photography. Hence my posts on ‘index and icon‘, ‘congruence‘, ‘cultural context‘ and, in earlier days, ‘interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary‘ thinking. Photography impacts so many disciplines – science, history, anthropology, ecology, art, cultural studies, business and so on … maybe even …
The Index and the Icon
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an early semiotician. His work was based on the pursuit of scientific and logical truth, and he developed his semiotics by using graphical representations (drawings and sketches). In discussing the kinds of relations that exist visually between signs and their objects, he noted three categories: an index – a reference to reality, including constituent parts of …