I took this photo over a month ago, documenting a neighbor’s house almost going up in flames. While it was not fun to watch, the Macon fire department did a professional job putting a quick end to something that could have been a lot worse. Those folks rocked.
I’m posting this photo tonight because I showed it to my Media Criticism class in order to talk about semiotics. Based on our reading for this week, we analyzed the photo (after we looked at Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me”) as a cultural text — discussing the social codes, technical codes, representational codes, and ideological codes — borrowing a heuristic from John Fiske’s “The Codes of Television.” They had some great observations about the photo, and only at the end when someone asked, did I tell them I was the photographer. I think using concrete examples, as Fiske does in his article, the lesson about semiotics — and it’s sometimes difficult concepts — was more easily grasped.
This is something we’ll be working on all semester.
