Reading Pictures

Abstract

Reading pictures means first digesting the words that inhabit or surround them: words in pictures, words framing pictures by way of titles or wall captions, and words of the texts to which pictures allude. But while pictures almost always come to us embedded in language, they are not the same as texts. Even though many elements of pictures may be construed as signs, a pictorial sign is not the same as a verbal sign or a textualized image, nor is it anything like a noun or verb, as Louis Marin proposed. To read pictures, we must reckon with these differences as well as with their subsemiotic attributes—their marks. We must be willing to read whatever remains illegible in a textual sense, whatever in a painting resists being verbalized or turned into a sign. In so doing, we challenge and stretch our conception of what it means to read anything at all.