Showing Love without Saying it

Love. This picture shows or represents love without having to actually say "this is love". I have interpreted this whole image as meaning and showing the idea of what love looks like, or could look like. I can do this because of the idea of semiotics. Semiotics is roughly "the study of signs". Signs can be in the form of words, images, signs, gestures, or objects. A thought behind semiotics is that we construct our reality based on the way we interpret the signs around us. Meaning that the culture in which we are apart of helps to influence what the signs mean. This is because we assign meaning to things; they do not tell us what they are, we decide the meaning of something. There are several things that make this picture represent "love".

First, I saw what appears to be a pair of girls legs and a pair of males legs next to each other. The two people are sitting next to each other on a curb and are sitting tightly so that their legs and feet just barely touch. That is all that is visible of the actually people in this picture, but so much can be taken from just that. The body language suggests that they are comfortable with each other or attracted to each other because of the closeness and angle of their bodies. The position of the girls feet could also possible suggest nervousness, but of the good kind. Or of sadness. There are words involved with the image as well.

The words "come back soon." say so much. It means that these two people clearly care about each other and want to be around each other and are probably in love with each other. One of them has to go away and the other is letting them but saying to hurry back to them. The words "i feel safe" clearly show that this person feels safe with and because of the other person. Love is feeling safe, nervous, and excited for the return of the one we love after they have been gone. Although, few words are shown and less then half of an image, the idea that this image was trying to express comes through clearly.

Through semiotics we can take away meaning from symbols in many ways. The picture above represents "love" by the combination of what we know from our culture as body language that suggests love, and words that describe characteristics of love. This image is in a way showing the thoughts of the person in the picture who probably cannot say them out loud yet. This image overall uses semiotics in a creative yet subtle way to show "love"