Entre esconder e mostrar: estratégias enunciativas em fotos de Vivian Maier

Abstract

Photographs have become an ever more intrinsic part of modern everyday life, and even though discursive semiotics has investigated this type of object broadly through its plastic approach, the photographic text is not restricted to this dimension and, according to Dondero (2015), needs to be investigated as a paradigm put forth by an act of enunciation, production and reproduction, which determine its constitution. In this sense, as the author points out, there is still much to be developed in the field of semiotics to include these elements in the analysis of photographs. With the intent of contributing with these questions in visual semiotics and, specifically, photography, this work aims to analyze the enunciative strategies mobilized for the constitution of the acting body in photographs by Vivian Maier, investigating how the sensorimotor aspects of the photographic enunciative activity contribute to directing the reading of the visual text. It is also of our interest to understand which meaning effects are summoned in these operations and how they contribute to the construction of a visual identity in Maier’s visual text. In regards to the methodological aspects, the research has as corpus eight photographs of the self-portrait type of the North-American photographer Vivian Maier. The analysis began with the investigation of the imagetic constituents through the figurative elements and plastic categories (Floch, 1985) and then focused on the aspects of photographic enunciation studied by Dondero (2014; 2015; 2016) and corporeality outlined by Fontanille (2017). At the end of the research, we conclude that Vivian Maier’s self-portraits challenge the notion of identity as something stable, since, by unraveling the plastic layers and sensibilities evoked by the artist, it was possible to grasp a markedly fluid subjectivity, constructed through strategies of hiding and showing that often operate as a suspension of the categories of person and space.