ABSTRACT
Visual semiotics is used in many fields of study, including anthropology, medicine, psychology, art, cultural studies, media analysis, religion, and philosophy. Visual semiotics has been around as long as sign systems have existed––long before Saussure or Peirce. This chapter aims to examine students, educators, and researchers understand how visual semiotics as a theory and as a method can be used to analyze and interpret messages contained within sign systems. Thomas Sebeok re-invigorated scholarly interest in visual semiotics in the 1970s and transformed its study into a pivotal branch of the integrated science of communication. Semiotics encourages an “expert deep reading” or investigation of how such a scene shapes meaning––aesthetically, culturally, emotionally, and morally. Charles Sanders Peirce developed theories on many subjects such as logic, pragmatics, mathematics, esthetics, philosophy, and semiotics. F. Merrell said, One of the best qualifications of Peirce’s symbol is a linguistic sign whose interrelation with its semiotic object is conventional.
