Hegemonic signification in photograph

Abstract

[Abstract] The present paper attempted to distinguish certain hegemonic strategies of encoding for depicting «the people» in the photography of the public space of communication during the Stalinist period. These were, on the one hand, photographs that had acquired the status of an icon in the public space; and on the other, the internal principles of construction of these «iconic» photographs, for which the following means of encoding were distinguished: 1) the dominant text as the dominant element of the process of signification depicted in the photograph; 2) code-text as the principle of organization of the mutual relationships between elements depicted in the photograph. It seems that the Soviet public scopic regime is characteristic of the type of culture that Lotman has characterized as a collection of texts, as opposed to the type of culture that creates the collection of texts (Lotman; Uspenskij 1994, 245). In this type of culture, the content of the culture is pre-given with respect to the selfunderstanding of that culture, it consists of the sum of normalized, «correct» texts: «iconic photographs» that have been encoded according to a unitary canon.