This thesis examines the multifaceted strategies employed in Pressbyrån's 2023 Cinnamon Bun Campaign, which gained nationwide attention in Sweden for its humorous approach. The campaign aimed to depict the Swedish cinnamon bun, a staple of the Swedish fika tradition, in an extravagant and luxurious light. Focusing on the interplay between humor and luxury, the study uses a multimodal analysis, utilizing Semiotic and Social Semiotic approaches to understand the visual material and its conveyed meanings. Using a theoretical framework that includes Stuart Hall's (1973) encoding and decoding model and Marxist theory, the research examines how the campaign commodifies the cinnamon bun, imbuing it with social value within capitalist culture. The investigation also places the campaign within Swedish cultural traditions and explores the intersection of humor, luxury, and cultural contexts. The literature review covers perfume advertisements, humor in advertising, and the commodification of cultures, providing a comprehensive background for the analysis. The analysis identifies visual cues and luxury codes within the campaign's posters and discusses their impact on audience perception. It also explores how humor through parody intersects with cultural contexts, particularly in challenging Swedish norms of moderation (lagom) through exaggerated luxury. The findings reveal that the campaign strategically uses visual elements reminiscent of luxurious perfume advertisements, creating a humorous dissonance between the perceived extravagance of the bun and its ordinary consumption. The study highlights the complex dynamics between humor, luxury, and cultural contexts in advertising. While humor effectively captures attention, its efficacy in enhancing brand recall remains uncertain. Nonetheless, Pressbyrån's campaign serves as a compelling case study, offering insights into the intricate relationship between consumer culture, tradition, and humor in advertising.

This thesis deals with visual communication in the form of photography. Explaining the theories of Roland Barthes and Vilém Flusser we point out the tight relationship of this medium with reality that obscures its constructive character. The witness role of photography seems to be essential in the context of journalism, where we are offered a story by the pictures that is however mistaken for reality itself. The thesis tries to present practices of media discourse that make us perceive an event as newsworthy. It draws on the theory of news values and the methods of social semiotic analysis and applies these to the winning photos of the contest Czech Press Photo (2006-2015). We highlight the semiotic resources used in the meaning-making process in relation to each picture. The results show that the preferred constructed news values are negativity, aesthetic appeal, proximity and personalisation and that the winning photographs mostly strengthen their semblance of being strictly informative.

Contemporary constantly expanding content of social media like Instagram brings the medium of photography to new contexts. Photography becomes an instrument of immediate communication and its historically defined functions are an object of change. The continuity of Instagram content creating, the personal perspective of its users, the constant presence of camera accompanying them are aspects analogous to the artwork of Nan Goldin. Goldin's photo essay ​The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986)​has a character of visual diary that captures the life of her community with almost obsessive continuity. It's also captured from deeply personal perspective depicting intimate moments and describing Goldin's personal relationships. Publishing of ​The Ballad​and formation of Instagram is divided by more than twenty-five years and both events and its meanings are profoundly different. This thesis nevertheless presumes that comparison of these, in many aspects alike phenomenons can help describe the change of the function of the media of photography, explore contemporary tendencies in photography aesthetics, the meaning of instagram's content to its users and provide general understanding of the role of shared photography in social and historical context. The methods of comparison are semiotic visual analysis,...

The thesis aims to describe how was the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, which began in June 2019 in response to the proposed extradition law, perceived. In its theoretical part, the thesis will focus on a detailed description of the historical development of Hong Kong and the formation of an independent Hong Kong identity. Major events will be presented, from the times of colonial administration to the description of pro-democracy protests in 2019, which affected the current state of Hong Kong. Subsequently the theoretical framework of the processes of hegemony and visual representation will be introduced, which will be further presented in the context of Hong Kong. Last but not least, the topic of journalistic photography and its significance in the current journalistic field will be defined. The practical part of the thesis will offer an analysis of how the direct participants perceived the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and whether their perceptions of events correspond not only with each other but also with the journalistic visual material that mapped four months of protests. A photo essay from the author's set of photographs was created to be also analysed in this work, part of which was subjected to a socio-semiotic analysis. Last but not least, there will be a comparison of results...