Semiotic interpretation of photos in Leslie Silko’s Storyteller

Abstract

Abstract Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American female writer, includes many photos about family and land in her autobiography Storyteller. The relations of images and words in her book are analyzed from the perspective of semiotics, particularly from Roland Barthes’s image rhetoric. The linguistic message and the coded and non-coded iconic message of the photos help in understanding the Laguna Pueblo concept of time and place. Photos about family show the cyclical time expanse of the family history and the change of traditions in Laguna. Photos about land and the stories behind pass on their ancestral culture to the next and the next generation. Photos, as a sign to be against linear time and against humans’ violence to nature, help the indigenous reshape their history and re-envision their subjectivity.