Hide and show: the rhetoric of anonymy in the language of photography

Abstract

The article discusses the phenomenon of anonymity in the language of photography. The prevalence of this phenomenon in journalism and exhibition space photographs indicates the relevance of the study. In this context, the most adequate to the subject and productive from the point of view of obtaining significant scientific results is semiotic methodology. First of all, the authors of the article adhere to the trajectory of the development of modern semiotics, based on the conceptual ideas of the general theory of semiosis. This trajectory focuses on the process of functioning of the sign and brings to the fore the concept of interpretation. It allows avoiding a straightforward linguistic orientation and taking into account the uniqueness of non-verbal messages, without denying the existence of similarities between various semiotic practices. This approach allows us to speak about the existence of visual rhetoric, the reliance on which is the most appropriate for messages corresponding to the category of the anonymity phenomenon. As a result, the authors of the article reveal the specificity of the visual rhetoric of anonymity, which consists in the fact that the sender of the message avoids direct demonstration of the object, uses an indirect form of its representation, which in turn provokes the recipient of the message to put forward a set of interpretants and increases the degree of his activity and involvement in the semiotic process. There are many methods of such representation, the list of which is analyzed in this article. These techniques can be divided into two categories: the ones in which the dominant is working with photographic objects and the ones in which the dominant is working with the components of the photographic code.