semiologists prefer blondes

This is one of my favorite portraits taken by photographer Richard Avedon. In truth, I would take any opportunity to incorporate his work and wisdom into a conversation, but this opportunity seems valid considering a photograph of Marilyn Monroe is cited in the explanation of semiology. This image is extraordinary by virtue of its candidness and subsequent deviation from the connotative and ideological function prescribed to a similar photograph in the article; "[...] Hollywood is about reproducing the institution, culture of ideology of the White middle-class United States to which all should aspire, or, if they do not, they will perish." Understanding the intricacies of this reading was definitely a challenge, so I found myself trying to apply the somewhat clinical and borderline existential definitions to more accessible expressions of semiotics in visual theory. Avedon spoke often about the role of the image, the subject, and the artist as both products and producers of meaning. Though he never specifically connected his ruminations with the various levels of signification as outlined by the reading, I think his artistically-minded approach still speaks to the same conclusions about film theory in relation to semiology. Avedon once said, "A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." Semiotics contributes to the debate around cinema (and perhaps visual image) as language by asserting that "language functions as a system of signs but not in a simplistic one-to-one relation [...] language does not therefore reflect reality." Avedon's quote supports this claim, and similarly, his contribution to the canon of photographs of the famous Hollywood starlet certainly activates the latter half of the "myth of Hollywood: the dream factory that produces glamour in the form of the stars it constructs but also the dream machine that can crush them-all with a view of profit and expediency." This photograph is one of my all-time favorites because it deconstructs a star, the much photographed Monroe, with its level of honesty or dare i say "reality"- and in doing so simultaneously supports and complicates the ideology represented by its subject.