Meaning Construction Of Pictures

Images as one kind of semiotic resources have been an indispensable element in our daily life. How to understand the visual potential meaning as well as how to develop our "visual literacy" is of great importance. However, both at home and abroad, the concern for empirical visual analysis is mostly about advertisements, cartoons, architectures and so on; and there’s limited study on news documentary photography.Based on Halliday (1994)’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), Visual Grammar (VG) has provided structured theoretical foundations for interpreting the meaning potential in pictures and also made a great contribution to MDA. However, the fact that it lacks grammatical foundations and seems to be too subjective can’t be ignored. Meanwhile, meaning construction relates closely to cognitive conceptual system of human beings, which indicates both the thoughts and actions of people are metaphorical in nature no matter it is presented in form of written word or imagery. As a result, it is reasonable to combine pictorial metaphor theory (PMT) with VG and there also exists possibility to fill in the theoretical gap for it.The present study combined Kress and van Leeuwen (1996)’s VG with PMT proposed by Forceville (1996) and took SF-MDA as an analytical tool to analyze news documentary photographs in New York Times from three aspects, specifically, movement, camera positioning and spatial position, in attempt to investigate the progress of metaphorical meaning construction.The present study aims at probing the following questions:(1) what kinds of visual representation are contained in news documentary photographs? (2) How do news documentary photographs construct meaning through visual representation or metaphorical mapping? (3) Why do different kinds of visual representation present in different or the same way? Whether it is corresponding to the genre?Results showed that pictorial metaphor in case of documentary photographs is more covert than those in ads, cartoons and paintings; there are two forms of pictorial metaphor mapping, namely the substituted kind and separated juxtaposed kind; meanwhile, the potential meaning in news documentary photographs is highly genre-dependent.