Does anyone remember this image? If you clicked on it you know that it was an ad for the final Sopranos episode.

I have never seen an episode of The Sopranos, but in a way that makes me better suited to this assignment which is to analyze it through the theoretician Ronald Barthes who wrote an essay about Pasta ads. I'm not going to bother explaining that and jump straight into some quotes:

"We will start by making it considerably easier for ourselves: we will only study the advertising image. Why? Because in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional...the signifieds of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible."

This quote comes at the end of a short exploration of weather or not images have meaning (you can probably guess that he thinks they do). This is an interesting point in that rarely would advertising be brought into an argument about the communicative possibilities of an image, an argument most likely argued by artists. However if images could not convey meaning then all advertisements would consist of text. Look back at that Sopranos ad for a second. Speaking as someone unfamiliar with the show, those words have no meaning for me whatsoever. They don't even come out and say what show it is. Sure, they may not be a high art but the fact that he ad was effective removes any doubt that the image can communicate.

Now that that is sorted out, onto the next quote:

"A second sign is more or less equally evident: its signifier is the bringing together of the tomato, the pepper and the tricolored hues (yellow, green, red) of the poster; its signified is Italy or at least Italianicity."

The first thing which likely caught the viewers attention about that sopranos poster is the fact that the only color throughout is the red of the text. The actual reddened words thrust meaning into a relatively obtuse image. True, red is often associated with America, but placed on a predominantly black and gray poster it takes a sinister tone. What would seem patriotic in a, say, bluer setting comes across as cynical and ironic in this image.

"Secondly the operation of the drawing (the coding) immediately necessitates a certain division between the significant and the insignificant: the drawing does not reproduce everything (often it reproduces very little), without its ceasing, however, to be a strong message; whereas the photograph, although it can choose its subject, its point of view and its angle, cannot intervene within the object (except by trick effects)."

On this point I am going to slightly disagree with Barthes. True, everything which is stated here is correct. However Barthes seems to be downplaying the importance of trick effects to manipulate the meaning of an image. The Sopranos image is obviously photoshoped. Almost no one would glance at that and think it was taken on location. Though this is hardly aesthetically pleasing, the difference in sharpness imediatly draws our attention to the actor. He and the text almost look like they are on one level and the rest of the image on another. This makes us, without thinking, imedatly attach the meaning of the text directly to him before we have even really examined the background. If this were a candid (or at least looked like one) the right composition could send out eyes straight to the statue of liberty. As it stands the monument feels more like an afterthought to fortify the point. In this way Barthes undermines the cameras ability to manipulate and draw attention in an almost illustrative way. Sure, he was writing this in the 50's when trick effects had nowhere near the power they have now, but the rebuttal still stands.