"Looking at Photographs" and Class discussion

This article talks about the semiology of photographs. It also brought up the point that photographs are pretty much thrown at people, and they are not seen by deliberate choice. I never really thought about that, but it is so true. Because when it comes to film, or paintings we usually will pay to see them, where as photographs are everywhere. They are inevitable. If you watch the news, if you read a newspaper, if you look through a magazine, they are everywhere. But after today's discussion in class, it really made me think about semiotics, and how to read a photograph. I think that the exercise that we did in class, with choosing photographs and looking and analyzing their signs was a good exercise, but at the same time it made me think about the average person. I know that I tend to read into photographs because of my interest in photography, but I really don't believe that the average person, is going to read that far into a photograph. Even in advertisements; For example, in class we chose two photographs, I wouldn't say that I would have read into those photographs the way we did if I was just looking through a magazine. I think that a photograph really has to catch the average person's (someone that doesn't have an interest in photography) attention to be effective in its signs. And I think the signs need to be blatantly obvious to the viewer. Even the photographs that we looked at in class, are images we see in the newspaper and on the news. But I think that more people would look at the photograph and then read the article with it, than look at the photograph and truly study it, which is what we did. I think that is something that as photography students or people with an interest in photography are trained to do. We are completely interested in reading a photograph and not the article. At least that is what I do.