NATURE AND CULTURE IN TIAGO SANTANA’S PHOTOGRAPHY

Abstract

Our article results of a recent research in visual semiotics and intends to investigate the process of sense in images from the photographer Tiago Santana from Ceará. Semiotics, as a relationship theory, puts elements together that can be significant units of any magnitude, from the point of view of meaning. So, the visual components of a picture can be understood as terms of a sense being in a relationship dimension. These relationships work in different levels of analysis as we know from the model of the Greimasian semiotics, revealing a process which involves from the construction of a narrative programming in a global trajectory (able to simulate the generation of meaning from the deep structure to the superficial one) until the opening, recently, of a field to the tensive semiotics used in our analysis. Using as theoretical framework also the studies by Floch (1985), Pietroforte (2007) and Dondero (2008, 2011), we have found clarifying results of the opposition human/culture vs. animal/nature, observed in the construction of a country field in five photographs from our base corpus.