This image was taken by me in New York City just within the 100 days after President Trump’s inauguration. This information is important as knowing it, I think, conveys a new meaning to the image. The denotation is The Empire State Building and the American flags but for me, the connotation is much more however it is interpreted. America is well-known for being a patriot’s country and that evolves around the country’s symbol of freedom, the flag of The United States. Not only does this image immediately place a spectator in the location but when put into context the composition and use of selective colour evokes something darker, a new America, Trump’s America.
The dominance that both the flag and the Empire State portrays in this image was primarily down to the positioning; how the flags rise up along-side the New York Landmark and having a slight tilt in the image centres the top of it. I used the trope of black and white as this image is a part of a street photography series and I wanted to keep that classic, old photograph look to these very iconographic New York images.
I also wanted the flag to be a statement within the image and that is why the use of selective colour was perfect because it turns the image from being a street photograph lost in a series into having a more symbolic meaning, politically and culturally when taken into account the time that the image was taken (January 2017).

Following this analysis of my image, I think this is an example of how semiotics is important in terms of studying photography and just how we see photographs as individuals. It tells us that there is much more than what we see on the surface in a photograph and in an intelligent way, we get to interpret what we see within the image through connotations of colour, expression, composition etc.

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018, Semiotics Study of Signs. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Available from https://www.britannica.com/science/semiotics