Picture Interpretation and How to Attain Pleasure from a Text

The creation of a text could be the result of a desire for pleasure. This pleasure is felt both by the author of a text as he creates it and by his unknown reader. Pleasure may be the truth latent within a text, one which both the reader and author observe with satisfaction as part of the beauty of the text. Gadamer, a prominent contemporary philosopher regards truth and beauty as two indivisible factors within a text and particularly within a work of art. He believes pleasure is attained once the truth latent within a text is exposed. A photograph or picture, just like a pleasurable text, exposes its truth to that special spectator that manages to see that truth. Roland Barthes analyzes the pleasure attained from a photograph in his book Camera Lucida, devoted entirely to photography. Studium and punctum,two elements resulting in visual pleasure in a photograph were first introduced in Camera Lucida. These concepts can also be used to analyze pictorial (virtual) texts.