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Abstract:
One of a handful of truly pioneering figures in visual semiotics, Jean-Marie Floch elaborated an approach that combined an analysis of the basic perceptual qualities and compositional strategies of the image, with a study of the cultural and historical significance of its representational dimension. A key collaborator of A. J. Greimas, Floch situated his project within the theoretical framework of Paris semiotics, which he helped to develop. He positioned his visual studies of familiar cultural objects in proximity to cultural anthropology and the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His five published monographs explore abstract painting, art photography, Russian icons, magazine advertisements, and comic books.
It is precisely by being careful to follow its own logic that semiotics can prove deserving of interest from others, and can make a valuable contribution to multidisciplinary projects.
-Jean-Marie Flock 1985a: 12
These qualities which constitute the chromatic expression code . . . are independent of the colorful shimmering of the plane surface. They are situated'behind' colors, as their invariants.
-Jean-Marie Floch 197Sb: 7
Jean-Marie Floch died in Paris 20 April 2001 at the age of fifty-three from complications of a brain tumor.1 A scholar published in The American Journal of Semiotics, he authored five books on visual semiotics, two of which have recently come out in English translation. In October 2001, the Sixth Congress of the International Association for Visual Semiotics devoted a plenary commemorative session to Floch's research in recognition of its importance and influence. Inspired by a passion for visual imagery, Floch dedicated his career to studying art photography and Russian icons, commercial advertising, modern and contemporary painting, and comic books-this last a highly-developed art form in France.
A collaborator of A. J. Greimas and his group in Paris, Floch was one of a handful of innovators who developed an approach to visual and spatial objects within a general semiotic theory. He worked to found a science that could show how visual images signify in society, and established a method based on the close description of particular images. An original thinker who was as allergic to doctrinal pedantry as he was immune from the flux of ephemeral intellectual fashions, Floch drew inspiration from art history and cultural anthropology, from semiotic theory and from psychological and philosophical...