The image communicates, it has a singular process of meaning that consists of two messages that make speech possible:
A denotative message (objective meaning). It is the coded message, which constitutes a material substructure (made up of points, lines, planes, color, proportions, figures) that prepares and facilitates the connotation. Not all its elements can be transformed into connotators, since a certain denotation always subsists in the discourse, without which the discourse would not be possible. It provides the material to aesthetically assess the image.
A connotative message (subjective meaning). It is a significant substructure, which depends on the ideology of the interpreter-receiver, and makes it possible for the number of readings of the same image to vary according to individuals (it is polysemic). However, the variation of these readings is not anarchic, it depends on the different knowledge contained in the image (practical, cultural, aesthetic knowledge), and this knowledge can be classified, constitute a typology, and are seen in the image as discontinuous features.
One thing is certain, an iconic image or text is not read in the same way as a written text; both are encrypted in man-made sign systems to encode, record, and decode messages, but with a different structure.
To read the iconic image you need:
- Analyze the formal structure and the specific keys with which the issuer of the image built it, as a person belonging to a group and at a specific time.
- Consider that the visual reading of the image and its interpretation is not unique nor is it performed in the same way by all human beings-recipients. These differences depend on each specific individual, their training, the culture where they have developed and been educated, and the historical moment in which they live.
In the reading and interpretation of the images, according to Félix del Valle, different competences of the human being are put into practice:
• Iconographic competence: allows to identify shapes and associate them with the real world; facilitates the objective analysis of the image, a hierarchical and differentiating vision.
• Encyclopedic competence: it will go as far as our visual memory of the world goes.
• Linguistic-communicative competence: makes it possible to describe the content of the image using verbal or written words.
• Modal competence (space-time): allows to identify different spaces and times.
• Aesthetic competence: assesses the aesthetic component.
• Connotative competence: it mediates the vision of the image according to the ideology and the concept of the world of the receiver of the same; it is precisely this ideological factor that makes us see “what is really not there” (connotation).
Image production
Comprehensive communicative competence not only considers the importance of knowing how to read iconic images, but also of producing them.
Sonesson and Gibson distinguish several forms of image production:
• Chirographic, that is, the image made manually using the fingers, a pencil, a compass or an instrument to record.
• Technographic, which uses technical elements, such as photography, cinematography and videography. Here there are also digital images, holograms or "virtual reality", which are produced with the help of the computer.
The communicative competence of the students of the School in general is rudimentary, because they enter with a minimum of knowledge of the field and, in addition, very few carry out any related artistic activity outside the school.
This situation puts them at the mercy of publicity and political propaganda, without elements to face this avalanche of visual and audiovisual messages.
"Advertising text, comics, television, cinema, videos, videogames, are proposed to persuade users from non-communication, from one-sidedness, creating reality effects for which it is necessary for students to have tools of interpretation and assessment ”.