What is the most single most important semiotic sign in this picture? Can you spot it?
ANSWER: It’s Prince Charles (now King Charles). In semiotics, the most important semiotic signs in complex images are often those which are MISSING.
Here’s the story, as told to futurist Joanna Lepore at the innovation conference IIEX North America, in Texas.
At the time this photo was taken, Prince Charles & Princess Diana were still married, but their marriage was in trouble …
“Diana and Charles went on a trip to India together. On this day, he was off attending some official engagement, meeting important people. And she attended a photo shoot. And she went and sat outside the Taj Mahal, which is a monument to love. A beautiful palace, built by a king to demonstrate the size of his love for his late queen. Diana sat there looking gorgeous in her outfit, very poised in her seat. And she’s conspicuously alone. It’s the absence of her husband in the picture which gives it all of its meaning. Princess Diana was a very skilled semiotician. The whole point of the photo is not what is there, but what is MISSING. It is a picture of a woman sitting in front of a temple of love, whose husband appears to have abandoned her.”
By the way, that’s why you should be very CAREFUL with approaches to semiotics which rely on counting things, because you (or your software) can only count things which are present. But so much of the skill of semiotics is noticing what is ABSENT. If all you do is count things, you will miss the best insights.
Rachel’s conversation with with Jo about semiotics, innovation and the future is full of these kinds of gems!
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