What's the story?

The first section of this assignment was to read 'Rhetoric of the image' written by Roland Barthes and discuss with a group. This essay looks into the different messages that can be obtained by a single image. Bathes looks at 'The Three Messages' , The Linguistic Message, The Denoted Image and Rhetoric of the Image. Although this essay was quite difficult to understand with just one reading after a couple of goes at it I was able to reach an understanding that with the three messages an image can be broken down and understood in more depth.

For the main part of this assignment I was asked to firstly go onto www.sxc.hu and collect three images at random from the randomizer on the webpage. These are the three images I was to work with below.

After asking a small selection of people to be my guinea pigs in this experiment, I received a varied length and detailed stories back from them. The same thing that stayed almost the same in each story was that the two old men liked to have a game of chess down on the beach with a cup of tea ( or another hot liquid ) before either returning home/ visiting a museum/ or other building structure. I was quite pleased with the outcome, once I had shortened the stories so that they were only a couple of sentences instead of a couple of paragraphs, the stories all had a similar link to them.

'It was a beautiful day at the beach, where the two men sat with a coffee over a game of chess before visiting a museum.'

Catriona Kennedy, 19, Primary Education

'A girl wakes in her large blue room and plans to go down to the town when she stumbles across two men playing chess, she then joins them for a cup of tea by the beach'

Catrina Maguire, 20, Anatomy and Physology

'Two old men liked to play chess by the beach and drink tea. However one day a large structure went up obscuring the beautiful view of the beach'

Leanne Evans, 19, Jewellery and Metalwork

'Two old friends sat playing chess before their weekly visit to the beach to have a catch up and a cuppa. Then ventured back to one of the old mens house'

Micheal Macdonald, 21, Architecture

I found it quite strange that people who came from different background and disciplines could easily come up with roughly the same story line as each other by using three simple images. Although my subjects all came up with similar stories, for the second part into the image experiment of this assignment I needed them to come up with practically the same story by adding a fourth image to the three I had already collected. I decided that my pilot story would be ' There were two men down at the beach having a game of chess over a cup of tea before they went to visit the local museum' I thought that with the images provided and judging by the stories I had already received that this story would be quite obtainable. This was my fourth image below.

Once I had added the fourth image the two men all of a sudden were for the larger majority of the time drinking tea over a game of chess at the beach which was exactly what I had wanted to be conveyed, this was pretty impressive I thought. Although they didn't always end up at a museum which i had intended there journey to go after there game of chess, so the last part of this experiment was to incorporate come text into one of the images. So i decided to add "Knowledge" into the picture of the building, unfortunalty I am not quite sure how to do that on my laptop so i cannot show you the image with text on it but I'm sure it wont be too hard to image it. Sorry about that. After this had been added it cleared up the mystery of what this building was with the further people i asked to take part in this experiment, it became clear that the building was a place to gain knowledge, although I had piloted to have the room as a museum, one person had said in their story it was a scientific room but apart form that I had gained the story that i had been looking for and thus completing this experiment.

Once this experiment was finished I then went back to Roland Barthes essay and re-read it and managed to gain a lot more understanding of his piece.