Semantic Markedness in the photographBy a look at Duane Michaels sequences

Despite the belief of the orthodox schools of semiotics, which emphasize the fundamental difference between visual (iconic) and linguistic (symbolic) signs and do not consider visual pictures as channels for conveying implicit and linguistic meanings due to imitation or objective similarity with reality, investigating the ratio of linguistic and pictorial signs has been one of the important topics of semiotics studies for more than half a century. Some structuralist semioticians, such as Roman Jacobsen, Roland Barthes, Yuri Lutman and Umberto Eco have taken advantage of modeling the symbolic system of language and its communicative roles to study systems, texts, media and non-verbal signs such as photographs, due to the increasing importance of the issue of visual representation in contemporary culture, especially the abundant use of photographs in the web space and virtual social networks. This issue has been interpreted in the context of a great transformation, which William J.T. Mitchell refers to as "the pictorial turn". One of the concepts that have not been addressed in the semiotic equilibrium of language and picture is "semantic markedness" which allows us to examine the semantic components of a photograph, in "referring" to reality or "deviation" from it. The present essay, assuming the similarity of "semantic markedness" and "connotation" in photographic rhetorical researches and bringing evidence of this similarity, while rereading the theory of markedness in linguistic studies of literature, has used this theory for the first time in the study of Duane Michaels's narrative photographs. According to the results of this research, which was carried out by an analytical-comparative method, on the one hand, Michaels' photographs are based on "straight photography" devices, such as conventional perspective, wide depth of field, substitution of grays equivalent to the degree of familiar colors that we know from objects in nature, imitation natural vision by adopting eye-level point of view, and relatively classic compositions, which are used to pretend to be real and on the other hand, they escape from reality by adding some arrays, such as multiple exposures, slow shutter speed to induce movement, and creating blurred and ghost-like figures. He In the meantime, by adding some semantic components and by creating a distance between the signified and the referent, both in the axis of paradigmatic and in the axis of syntagmatic, makes the "unmarked" reality marked, and creates new connotations. Where the objectivity of the photographs does not reflect the similarity of the signified and the referent, Michaels resorts to a special type of markedness, i.e., "subjunctive markedness", which is imposed on the photographs from a cognitive system. This cognitive system and implicit meanings in Michaels' photographs originates from poetry, stories, legends, myths, Eastern mysticism, and of course religious and psychological beliefs, and allows his selections not to be based solely on formal and semantic similarities with reality.