A rose is rose is a rose, Pegasus print, 2009

Barthes discusses the role of the photograph’s caption in directing the reader to read an image in a determined manner, where the signifier of the word stabilizes the accompanying photograph. In this way communication can perform its function of providing clear information, thereby reinforcing the doxa of acceptable and knowable public opinion.

This photograph is accompanied by a caption that is an obvious allusion to the poem of the same name by Gertrude Stein. But more broadly it is playing on the way this expression is used metaphorically to connote determined and fixed meaning to an object. The object is of course an arbitrary illusion, as the words first and foremost refer to themselves as letters that makeup the written or spoken word, and are thus a symbolic association with the idea of a ‘rose’ (which could be any named object). This image with its caption questions the order in which we read and privilege reading. It is attempting to open up the moment of enunciation to one of writing, whereby the text in the image reverses with the caption and vise versa. In highlighting the potential to unsettle the stability of the word, this piece questions text as a production that is pictorial and linguistic; object and sound (writing and speech). Additionally the role of photography as commonly understood to be an index of something that-has-been (the intractable) is undermined by the very words that are depicted; as the photograph is an endless reproduction so are the words uttered within it and outside it. The constraints of reading have been removed, the text is to a small extent, liberated.