Barthes examines themes of presence and absence, creates a debate on death of painting and that photographs represent death and the past. He explores a way to establish looking/reading a photograph of his mother and develops his own myth by inventing his own specific language to deconstruct a photograph. His motivation to do this, was to learn “what photography was in itself”. (p3 cCL)
Barthes examines themes of presence and absence, creates a debate on death of painting and that photographs represent death and the past. He explores a way to establish looking/reading a photograph of his mother and develops his own myth by inventing his own specific language to deconstruct a photograph. His motivation to do this, was to learn “what photography was in itself”. (p3 cCL)
Barthes examines themes of presence and absence, creates a debate on death of painting and that photographs represent death and the past. He explores a way to establish looking/reading a photograph of his mother and develops his own myth by inventing his own specific language to deconstruct a photograph. His motivation to do this, was to learn “what photography was in itself”. (p3 cCL)
JF = Jennifer Friedlander
RA=Ralph Arnheim
HR=Howard Rissattis
HF= Hal foster
ND=Nicola Diamond
Exposition: Setting forth of principle themes. Double entendre
Double entendre is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase
is devised to be understood in either of two ways. Often the first
(more obvious) meaning is straightforward, while the second meaning is
less so: often risqué or ironic. (wikipedia)
Barthes photographic language:
Noeme: this here now, that has been, the time of memory.
Studium: to
encounter the photographers intentions further, through human interest, what
the picture is about, what is its gestures, setting, actions, cultural and
political background.
Referent: the
target or the object in the photo, the idea, what it symbolizes, what it refers
to.
Puntum: What
captures the attention of the viewer, the sting, the peck, the cut, that
accident that pricks me. The element that rises from the scene.
The Connotation: whats in addition to its literal meaning?
Nascent: The act of being born, not yet matured, something just
thought of.
Urdoxa: primary
opinion. A Postsructuralist term. That assumes a refrain from any judgement
about reality, yet reality enters us through consciousness. (transcendental
subjectivity).
Ecocide: destruction of the natural environment.
Empirical: based on observational practice not theoretical.
Oneiric: burdensome, heavy obligation.
Veracity: truth.
Ariadne: most holy
Unary: uninteresting, doesn’t grab you, mass produced.
The Lucanian Real:
the authentic unchangeable reference, both to being/the self and external
dimension of experience. The infinite
and absolute as apposed to reality based, sense perception. The real always has
its place.
Barthes Real: The symbolic and imaginary real.
Vraisemblable: not reality itself but human beings interpretations
of reality. JF text
Barthes Referential realism: referring to something that happened.
A testament of what has been the reality, a stylistic indicator. JF text
Aesthetic realism: where an insignificant detail becomes meaningful
through
Conformity to cultural
convention of what humans know about representation. JF text
Categories of:
Professional. Amateur. Landscape,
objects, portraits, nudes, aesthetics, realism, pictorialism.
The amateur is a primate without
culture who has inconsequential taste.
Below is how Barthes reads a photo:
- · Distinguish what it represents
- · Action knowledge or reflection
- · Why was it photographed
- · Why was this moment captured?
- · What was considered for its composition
- · Is the result a consequence of my knowledge, culture, luck
- · Can I record the photo through emotion, rational, intermediary ( in the middle), ethically, politically.
- · What order are the photos in, hierarchy, chronologically.
- · What photograph is my post holy, most meaningful, most significant and precious
- · Would this photo constitute the thread that drew me to photography
- · What interests my stadium
- · What am I seeking to touch in myself and others through the photograph
- · What am I making certain of in my images
- · What idiosyncratic associations do I use ?
- · Is the photo a likeness of something
- · What does it resemble
- · Do this photo just create intimate confusion and suspense
- · Do the images need to restore what has been abolished by time, distance etc..
- · Did this photo exist to astonish, to renew something, to resurrect something.
- · Is it a reality in a past state
- · What does the photograph feed in my mind
- · Do I want to photograph something to intensely observe something, enlarge it to see it better, to understand it, to know its truth, to enlarge a detail, to reach the very Being of what it is in the photo, to hope I discover a truth in what is thought about photography
- · To transform a subject into an object.
- · To interrogate the evidence of something
- Why did he use/make up his own vocabulary to describe how he looked art the photograph?
Jennifer Friedlander
(the accident that will have happened, Barthes, Kertesz and the punktum.
Chapter 2 p17-30.
Questions I could
also ask my work:
§
What do I think of photography’s natural claim
on truth?
§
Where is the tension between a photos natural
claim on truth, cultural stains, convention and a captured experience?
§
Do I capture or arrange the truth?
§
Do I have a paradoxical juxtaposition between a
moment of chance with a planned scene or composition? Do I balance these?
§
Does my photography/artwork appeal more to the
aesthetic function of what is referential in my subject/work?
§
When do I mix mechanical objectivity (goal or existing freely or independently from
the thoughts of a conscious entity or subject. In a simpler form, Objectivity
is the ability to judge fairly) with truth,
and human intervention with deception?
§
How many accidents have helped me to build my
aesthetic preference?
§
What role does an accident play in my work?
§
Is there a tension between :form and content; juxtaposition;
opposites; Dali’s paranoid critical method for describing the exact opposite of
something. And can I clarify the point of balance?
Questions that were
raised from p64-67 CL (Judith Rugg seminar 7th
Nov 2012)
- § How will my work perish
- § What do I hold most central/precise to my practice
- § What am I visualising about my own time
- § What am I saying about my own history
- § What could I see in my work in say 20years time
- § Will I recognise myself in my current work, in 20years time.
- § What do I get when I look back at work I did 20 years ago.
- § How did my past influence the work.
- § How does my past influence my work now.
- § What unites my past work to the work I do now.
- what cultural values am i rejecting or contesting or challenging. (poststructulist question)
Jennifer Friedlander
·
Defines Barthes Camera Lucida is a meditation on
the photograph.
·
She calls the Punktum an accident between nature
and culture.
·
The word Punktum is (metonymic association)
something not called by its own name with unexplained resonances. (p18)
·
The word Punktum is random and tries to more
than state the presence of an accidental detail.
·
The word Punktum makes the image seem
unreasonable ‘uncanny and unheimlich.
·
It Disrupts cultural codes. (me: but maybe he is creating his own myth, language, set of codes, would
cixous have approved of this?)
·
It means more than a poignant accidental detail,
it goes beyond the Lacan reality based “Real”.
·
It produces what Paul Verhaeghe describes as
something ” just waiting around the corner, unseen, unnamed, but very present.
·
Evidence of or impressions of ‘aesthetic
realism” are: cracked lenses, unfocused images, irregular camera angles
Rudolf Arnheim:
Defines a photograph ‘as an occurrence in the lens view…
that is beyond the artists control.” P19
..‘The aesthetic
precision of the image complies with the conventions of modernism
contaminating nature with stains of culture’. P19
Howard Risattis’
Psychosociological and psychbiographical analysis: using the artists
biography and social cultural background and knowledge to gain insights into
the meaning of their work and trace the Punktum. To discover the author beneath
the work. P23 Friedlander text. JF text
Hal Fosters Nachtraglichkeit:
“…a deferred action provides a way of understanding the “psychic temporality of
the subject” as” a complex reality of anticipated futures and reconstructed
pasts…that throws over any simple scheme of before and after, cause and effect,
origin and repetition”. JF text p29
