A semiotic study on two works by Ahmad Aali entitled "Self-portrait"

Semiotics as a research method since the 1950s. It has been used in the field of recognizing the implications and understanding the mechanism of communication. The works of Levi Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes are significant in this regard. Roland Barthes is especially important in this regard. Also, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Umberto Eco and Algirdas Julien Greimas created important works in the field of literary theory and used the method of the Russian formalists in the 1920s. In the Soviet Union, they did outstanding work on literature and cinema. Barthe's works were very effective in the field of image semiotics because he wrote in the fields of photography, cinema and painting. The formation of the two main models of semiotics was due to the opinions and ideas of two famous theorists in this field, namely Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914). Semiotics, first introduced in language by Saussure, was extended to other socio-cultural fields by other semiotics. His attempt was to study the semiotic relations of phenomena as a system like the system of language. The visual spheres were no exception, as were figures such as Roland Barthes in photography and Christine Metz in cinema. In these studies, images were considered as a system in which all their components were related to each other, and each component derives its meaning through its relationship and difference with other components. In the present article, two works by Ahmad Aali with the common name of "self-portrait", one photo and the other painting, are analyzed semiotically. A graduate of the Visual Arts Conservatory with a degree in painting, he is more active in the field of creating photographic works, and his works range from documentary and somewhat realistic subjects to abstract works with semantic ambiguities. Ahmad Aali is one of the first Iranian photographers to introduce photography as an art to the Iranian Society of Visual Arts. Before him, photography had a non-artistic nature in Iran and was limited to documentary, studio photography and advertising photography. In the creation of these two works, Aali used the images of his previous works, and by doing so, he created a chain of signifier and signified relations that is considerable .In the present article, while introducing and explaining the theory of semiotics and image semiotics, the change of signifieds and the formation of the mentioned chain in both foresaid works have been studied. This research paper with descriptive-analytical method and assuming the formation of new signifieds in the new context of these two works, first describes and analyzes visual cues during companionship and substitution relations, binary contrasts and analyzes different signifieds in their field. In the final analysis, it was found that in both images, by creating new implication trends, as a result of merging different signs and using the artist's previous photographs, common meanings have been formed; The most prominent common signified between these two images is the concept of the rejection of some social discourses such as women's discourse, the elderly and especially artist's discourse.