ABSTRACT
Umberto Eco famously called semiotics the study of anything "that could be used to lie". It follows that semiotics studies utterances or representations that purport to be 'true', regardless of the physical modality of the medium in which they are realised. Epistemology is the study of truth claims and their justification, raising questions seldom explicitly canvassed in semiotic analysis. Kress and Van Leeuwen's approach draws our attention to what they call the 'gaze' of the models. Each woman 'addresses' the viewer in an 'affiliative' way as she looks at the camera and invites inclusion in her world, so to speak. The larger image of Michelle Lee poses her in a slightly submissive way, canting her head and looking 'back at' the viewer's gaze, thus confirming the connotations of her feminine 'beauty' label while consolidating an affiliative relationship with the viewer.
