Looking at the popular 'Peace For Paris' image we can start to think about authorship. Both the peace symbol and the image of the eiffel tower are borrowed images, prompting the question of wether Jullien is the original author, a question which is brought up by Barthe in Death of the Author, when he states, ' we know now that a text is not a line of work releasing a single theological meaning, but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, non of them original, blend and clash'. I believe that the Peace for Paris image is a good representation of this idea, with the main components of the image being borrowed from elsewhere to create the image that we know now.
We can also start to look at how the reader holds more responsibility to the text than the author does. Upon receiving a text, the reader does not always understand fully that context that it sits in, only the author can know this. With that being said we can begin to understand how it is up to the reader to interrupt and make their own understanding of the image rather that the author. This can also relate back to the Peace For Paris illustration. As it is a recent illustration drawn from recent events we can understand the context this was created in, but to someone who doesn't know about the attacks in Paris, they are pushed to make their own interpretation of the image, 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author'.
By beginning to look at Barthes' Death of the Author text we can start to understand how authorship doesn't always lie with the author themselves but with the reader and how they come to understand the text and which context they begin to understand it in. Maybe there are no authors as such and instead we all have a sense of authorship over work that we come into contact with, as Marx said in his 1846, The German Ideology, 'in a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other things'
