The Image and the Archive: A Semiotic Approach

Dennis Dunleavy, San Jose State University

(HANDBOOK OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION: THEORY, METHODS, AND MEDIA, 2005: 258-259)


ARCHIVE/IMAGE INTERRELATE AS INDEXICAL SIGNS
The etymological root of the word archive as a place for preserving historical material is drawn from the Greek archeion or official documents from a government house.5 The authority of the archive resides in the power of signification relating to a system of signs that communicate an aura of immutable facts concealing larger social, cultural, political, economic, and historic contingencies. Further, the archive as a source of social knowledge
also mediates experience, rarifies representations, and extenuates interpretants. At the same time, historic images hold semiotic value because they have been appropriated as objects of cultural significance. In the process of collecting and conserving objects, the curator often acts as the custodian and agent of interpretants. With some level of confidence, semiotics offers a systematic approach toward reading the layers of signification
in an archived image as they function to intermediate the causal connection between institution and artifact. According to Peirce's schema, historic images as indexical signs correlate a causal connection to a hierarchical social order by virtue of value exchange placed on them through collecting and conservation.6 The archived image, as an indexical sign of a semiotic object, that is, the archive, indicates or points toward an actual or imagined causal connection.7 Therefore, without considering the interrelation of objects and the existential connection of how the historic image "points-to" the archive as a source of socialized knowledge, only a superficial illusion of the past may be achieved (Zeman, 1977, pp. 36-37).

ARCHIVE/IMAGE INTERRELATE AS ICONIC SIGNS
Semioticians have long argued over Peirce's division of signs; however, the notion of an icon, something that "partakes of the life of its object," has been the most problematic (Zeman, 1977, p. 37). As Moriarty observed, sign systems are "grounded in perception, extended internally through cognition and language, and modified through social and cultural frames."8 The archived image intrinsically resembles the similarities and properties of an object and therefore leads the viewer to believe it to be an immutable and objective representation of that which has been captured by the camera. In this way, the signifier and the signified become inextricably linked (Carter, 1998). In an archive, signification operates through the transient process of encoding and decoding meanings. As researchers sift through historic material, images act as visual clues whereby knowledge of a specific historic contingency is decoded through interplay of emotional and intellectual appeals. For Pink (2001), "Any experience, action, artifact, image or idea is never definitively just one thing but may be redefined differently in different situations, by different individuals and in terms of different discourse."9 The archived image, as a sign within a series of signs, that is, the collection, infers meaning through associations and interrelations between signifier and signified. This process becomes abductive when the viewer uses observation or visual cues to make sense of a scene in order to construct a logical hypothesis about the subject, relationships, or patterns. Further, this is why as Moriarty noted "Semiotics and the notion of abduction can be such a useful tool in visual
communication research and theory building."

ARCHIVE/IMAGE INTERRELATE AS SYMBOLIC SIGNS
The symbolic signification of images resonates from the conventional associations to which they are anchored with a particular context. The meaning of an archived image begins with the researcher's experience with the conventional relation between object and sign (Greenlee, 1973, p. 93). In one respect, the sign system of index and icon is brought together through the conventional explanations of agreed on meanings. For Zeman, "The employment of icons and indexes is a necessary condition of communication but the conceptualization that is so essential a part ofhuman interaction with the environment rests directly on symbols" (1977, p. 38). The researcher approaches the archive with a set of assumptions, expectations, and problems to solve. Meanings grow through experience with other signs, especially icons. As a sign, a symbol is not naturally or universally linked to the semiotic object, but is bound by the intellectual and emotional associations made through the social conventions used. In Moriarty's analysis of the power of advertising images, she concluded that what is visually communicated and mediated for us is often associated with "lived experience."