“Read the room”: images, signs, and stories

We’ve seen that character is a central component of a story. But when it comes to images, stories can be told even when no characters are present. So how does an image tell a story? Perhaps images use a type of suggestion, gesturing to the past and present, inviting us to think about what has just happened and what is about to happen, as well as what is outside the edges of the frame.

When we start to think about how images tell stories, we begin to realise that storytelling involves a range of techniques and practices beyond just formulating a plot. Indeed, when we look at visual stories, we find ourselves confronted with the elaborate signification or meaning-making practices that lie at the heart of all communication.

Try this. Visit a royalty-free stock photography site like Pexels or Unsplash. Type “empty room” into the search bar, and scroll through the results. For each image, see if you can determine something about the people who dwell in or use this room. What sort of people are they? What are their qualities? And while you’re at it, what sort of room is this? What is its purpose? Where in the world is it located?

Image by Peter H from Pixabay. Whose room is this? What’s their story?

The results may vary, but it’s likely that for many of the images you’re able to answer at least one of these questions. And maybe your answers are quite detailed. You may even be able to write a long list of adjectives describing the fictional, unseen person who inhabits this room. They are fastidious or messy. They are wealthy or poor. They are young or old. They are interested in surfing, poetry, or science. Their life abounds with misery, solitude, busy-ness, or joy. It’s also likely that for at least some of the images you’re looking at, you can determine these things very quickly. In fact, the very act of capturing the various meanings you’re making from the image may feel like slowing down the wheels of a mental machine that’s moving at speed.

What you’re identifying here are signs: the building blocks of stories. A sign is a unit of meaning, and all stories – indeed, all messages, all texts, all products of communication – are organised collections of signs. Every object in the empty rooms, every colour, every light and every shadow, is a sign that you can interpret to gain meaning about the room and its inhabitants. A cooking pot is a sign: it tells you that the room in question is a kitchen. A pot that is cleaned to the point of shining and hung on a hook above the sink tells you that the person who uses this kitchen is cleanly and takes pride in their work, whereas a pot that is grimy or caked with food and left in the sink tells you that the person is messy, or busy, or unconcerned with cleanliness. A glimpse of an outdoor landscape through the kitchen window featuring eucalyptus and wattle trees may be a sign that the kitchen is located in Australia. Dark shadows may be a sign that the kitchen is a spooky or threatening place – or that it is night-time.

Signs can be words – the sound of a word, the letters, the appearance of a word on a page. Signs can be visual – colours, shapes, visual devices like camera angles, the clues that help us decipher an image. And signs can also be sounds – a sound effect, a piece of music, a particular musical note or chord. Think about how effectively sonic signs are used by big global brands today, from the Netflix “ta dum” timpani strikes to the five notes that constitute McDonalds’ “I’m loving it” jingle.

Anything that communicates meaning is a sign: gestures, movements, symbols, designs. And we can further break a sign into two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the form of the sign. It’s what we perceive with our senses. In the case of a word, the signifier can be the letters on the page, or the sound of the spoken word. The signifier might also be an image, a colour, a gesture, a facial expression; something we recognise. The signified is the meaning attached to that sign, or the concept represented by the signifier. For example, the signified is the concept that jumps into your mind when you see the word TREE, or when you see an image of something with a brown trunk and green leaves.

One of the best ways of understanding how signs work is by thinking about colour. Colours are signifiers, and each colour has many attached meanings or signifieds. You can see how this works in the video below.

COLOR PSYCHOLOGY from LidiaSeara on Vimeo. Each colour is a signifier, with many possible signifieds.

The meanings that are attached to colour allow communicators – including filmmakers, advertisers, graphic designers, photographers, and more – to use colour as a kind of visual short-hand, a means of activating particular sets of meanings. This can occur quickly and with minimal fuss. Why? Because storytelling is underpinned by certain codes and conventions. A code is a set of shared understandings about how signs are used. If we know the rules, we can use them to engage more effectively with our audiences. But these shared understandings might differ from culture to culture. Meaning is not fixed, and it is not universal. So red signifies danger or anger – but not to everyone, everywhere, across the world.

Semiotics

We are venturing here into semiotics: the science of signs. Semioticians are concerned with how meaning is made through sign systems, and semiotics or “semiology” emerged as an area of study in the late nineteenth century, led by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. What semiotics gives us is a set of communication concepts that can be used to analyse and also produce messages – it’s a theory that underpins communication practice especially in fields like branding and graphic design.

Semiotics also has beautiful relevance for the study of storytelling. Ignasi Ribó describes narratives as “semiotic representations” because “they are made of material signs (written or spoken words, moving or still images, etc.) which convey or stand for meanings that need to be decoded or interpreted by the receiver” (2019: 2). Semiotics as the study of signs also allows us to see that anything can tell a story: a costume, a piece of music, a work of graffiti – or an image of an empty room.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash. Read the room – what signs can you identify?

Visual storytelling

Images (as collections of signs) tell stories in many ways. To unpack the stories told by a picture, we can consider content (what is in the image, and what is not) and composition (how the image is arranged). We can reflect on where our eyes are drawn when we look at a picture, and how signifiers like lighting, camera angle, focus and depth of field are used to limit the range of possible ways we might respond. Written captions can further limit or “anchor” the range of potential stories told by an image, a semiotic concept known as anchorage (Barthes 1977: 156).

Images can also tell stories through visual metaphor. A metaphor is best known as a device used in writing and speech. When we use a metaphor, we communicate the meaning of one thing by referring to something else. The phrase “her expression was thunderous” is an example of a verbal metaphor. We don’t mean that the person literally has thunder on her face – we are using the idea of thunder to communicate something about the person’s facial expression (that it’s dark and angry.) A visual metaphor, in turn, is when we communicate an idea or emotion using a seemingly unrelated image. A cluttered room could be a metaphor for a neglected inner self, or a busy mind. An empty room could be a metaphor for absence or loneliness. A prison room could be a metaphor for entrapment.

Visual metaphors have long been used in print advertising. As the semiotician Judith Williamson explained in her 1978 book Decoding Advertisements, when you place two otherwise unrelated objects side by side in an image, a transfer of meaning occurs from one to the other. This is the logic behind the simplicity of print advertisements that feature a celebrity alongside a brand. Through visual proximity, the qualities of the celebrity are metaphorically transferred to the brand. And let’s not forget about “root metaphors”, discussed in the previous section. An advertisement featuring a celebrity endorser will apply visual metaphor to forge a connection between celebrity and brand, but it may also establish or confirm ideologically informed notions about beauty, power, gender, or identity.

Reading the room is a semiotic exercise

Throughout this section, I’ve been asking you to “read the room”. Read the room is also an idiom – an expression used in the English language that has figurative, non-literal meanings. I’ve asked you to literally read the room: that is, determine who uses a particular room by deciphering the signs in an image. But in a different context, if someone asked you to “read the room” they might be suggesting that you try to understand your audience.

Interestingly, “reading the room” in its idiomatic sense is also a semiotic exercise. Someone who is adept at “reading the room” can pick up on subtle, often unspoken cues when communicating, and adapt their message, tone, or strategy to suit their audience’s responses. To read the room is to interpret the signs of everyday interactions, finding signifiers in posture, body language, facial expressions, and subtle audio cues like throat-clearing, sighing, or nervous laughter. A stony silence or a shift in the room’s energy can be subtle signifiers to which a skilled communicator will swiftly respond. What does this show us? Semiotic analysis is not just an academic theory – it is an everyday practice.

This section has shown that stories are built from signs, and that semiotics allows us to unpick the thread of a story in a way that is useful in the dual contexts of communication theory and practice. Applying semiotics, we can communicate more effectively and we can also analyse the products of communication and the meaning-making processes involved in their production. As we will see in the next chapter, meanings matter. But first, in the next section, you’ll hear from a Master of Communication student who investigated the stories we tell about non-human animals, using a semiotic lens to unpack the ‘hidden’ meanings within these stories.