The PHOTO OP series — to which SEMIOVOX has invited our semiotician colleagues from around the world to contribute — analyzes photos that we’ve snapped while “off the job.”

Dubai International Airport Transit Zone, 5 May, 2012.

There was a time when I would route as many work journeys as possible via a change in Dubai and some prolonged looky-feely time at the international airport transit zone’s duty-free emporium. The cigar area within the duty-free served as the inner sanctum of this temple of luxury consumption. And within that… a kind of ark of the covenant containing the Che Guevara cigar box. How we love that man! Even in the belly of the beast, at the dark heart of the global capitalist system. The face that stands as an almost religious icon of sacrifice in the cause of struggle for freedom, equality, comradeship, community, love. Written on the box, flagrantly defying all the surrounding evidence: Hasta la victoria siempre.

A recent read of Terry Eagleton’s 2018 book Radical Sacrifice brought this 2012 photograph back to life for me. A kind of spirituality which is not all harmony, beauty spa design cues, and wafty mindfulness. Where the sacred is in a meeting of degradation and revolutionary transcendence, where belief can infuse unstoppable energy and empower positive change.

Cayo Coco, Cuba, 24 August 2017.

I’ve been to Cuba 7 or 8 times in the last 12 years. For a host of reasons to do with sunshine, music, spontaneous friendship, beautiful heritage towns and cities, people of an emotional intelligence and critical acumen you don’t tend to come across too often back home. I also go to escape from the banality of brands and commercial junk space, which can erode the will to live for someone toiling day to day, like me, in the fields of affirming the freedom to choose between pretty much indistinguishable gee-gaws, and delighting to distraction ‘She’, the hypostasised Consumer who is Sovereign in All Things. It’s an opportunity to experience a pleasant alternative to the dictatorship of Coca Cola and MacDonald’s.

But here’s something that the tourists couldn’t bear to leave at home. I have deliberately not looked into who makes ChocoCrack, though I did wonder if it was what was called Krave in UK. I once got some Krave in for my children and they got through a box of it in under an hour. After four or five days of this, I decided I needed to call time on what was coming to feel like abusive single parenting, filling a black hole in my own soul with emotionally obesogenic kiddy-love. If you take this story on through time you get to what Bill Maher calls ‘the real pandemic’ — the obesity pandemic which, with obesity’s comorbidities, played into a significant majority of the deaths registered as being accompanied by COVID-19, i.e., the pandemic the commercial lobbyists didn’t persuade the policy makers to turn a blind eye to.

And so on to Ozempic. A technical fix that can allow us all the freedom to choose the Elvis diet while remaining svelte enough for Jailhouse Rock. Are the leader of the free world’s designs on Greenland actually a conjuror’s distraction of attention from the real target — Denmark’s prime commercial asset?  

Brighton, England, February 2025.

The Kellogg’s rooster symbol always arrests my attention because of a tradition in my family that it was one of us who came up with it and donated it to the brand. My late mother’s aunt, Nansi Richards, was a harpist so famous in Wales that she toured expatriate Welsh communities all around the world. On one of these tours she was introduced to the guy who had invented the cornflake. She told him in passing that the Welsh word ‘ceiliog’, which sounded very much like his surname, means ‘cockerel’, and that it might be appropriate to stick one of those on his boxes of breakfast cereal.

Kellogg’s tend to dismiss this story. But it is backed up by Nansi Richards’ autobiography Cwpwrdd Nansi (Nansi’s Cupboard). A couple of years ago the distinguished Welsh author and TV producer Ioan Roberts, who interviewed the elderly Nansi when he was starting out way back as a journalist, told me that she had confirmed the ‘ceiliog’ story as, indeed, true and that he, of course, believed her.

Even as a brand semiotician (until a couple of years ago), I would not have wanted to take any familial credit for this pack symbol. The original Mr Kellogg was, as I understand it, a deeply religious man — and the whole point of corn flakes originally was to replace with something bland and profoundly counter-hedonic all the provocatively rich porky eggy breakfast protein that he felt had led to a plague of masturbation in the U.S. All I can say to him, looking back and at the detritus of the declining empire’s culture around us today, is that your corn flakes clearly didn’t fix the problem. 

There is another oral tradition in my family that the famous Welsh actor Emlyn Williams, whose camp acerbic wit was known all around the country, once commented to Nansi at one of his endless alfresco brunches in summer: “If the old boy intended to stop Americans fiddling with themselves at the breakfast table, the very last thing he wanted to draw on the cereal box was a cock!”

PHOTO OP: Mariane Cara (Brazil) on LA LUCHA CONTINUA | Aiyana Gunjan (India) on YAMRAJ | Greg Rowland (England) on I ❤️ FOOD | Gabriela Pedranti (Spain) on NOT SO TRIVIAL | Biba Allarakia (Saudi Arabia) on ALL THAT GLITTERS | Brian Khumalo (South Africa) on A LOST MEMORY | Becks Collins (England) on A MILLENNIAL ON THE BRINK | Samuel Grange (France) on SLOW DOWN | Rachel Lawes (England) on DESKTOP COLLECTIONS | Marie Lena Tupot (USA) on BOX OFFICE | Sónia Marques (Portugal) on SWISS-NESS | Serdar Paktin (Turkey / England) on BOTTLE SERVICE | Stefania Gogna (Italy) on OPEN-AIR MUSEUM | Charles Leech (Canada) on IS IT IRONIC? | Kishore Budha (England) on DOWN THE TUBE | Josh Glenn (USA) on JOINED AT THE DIP | Mark Lemon (England) on SHOP LOCAL | William Liu (China) on SWAN SONG | Malcolm Evans (Wales) on CHOCOCRACK | Paulina Goch-Kenawy (Poland) on POLAND’S NEW (HI)STORY | Adelina Vaca (Mexico) on WHAT’S YOUR POISON? | Natasha Delliston (England) on NATURE BATHING | Ramona Lyons (USA) on DEATH TO TECH | Victoria Gerstman (England) on TBD | Ximena Tobi (Argentina) on TBD.

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET.