Visualising London

Abstract

This research investigates how photographs can be analysed to extract meaning. Two methodologies, visual anthropology and social semiotics, are used to analyse a collection of images and accompanying texts generated by a group of first year tourism students in London. Photographs are categorised into subject areas including iconic buildings, street scenes, people and analysed according to how they relate to the photographers’ characteristics, such as age and nationality. A group of images of Big Ben are then analysed using a social semiotics approach, considering both compositional and contextual information to extract meanings. Results and techniques are then contrasted and compared, noting how the complexity of the image makers’ experience of the city they are documenting lead to their images having multi-layered meanings, and that combining analytic methods can fruitfully reveal a range of these meanings.