Barthes

This lecture concentrated upon images, in particular photography. The reading came from Camera Lucida which having heard of before I can now relate to and understand much better. The reading itself was quite easy to digest. The sections of text were smaller and so more digestible than Deleuze’s work for example. This is something I should remember to apply to bodies of text such as my learning record in the future. Mostly as for own work, I think it is important that the reader can easily understand what I writing about.

In this reading we consider what is a photograph? It is not the image itself but the way in which we interpret it which is important. As with Heideggers notion of an object being boring, it is a combination of the physicality of the object and your experiences which create your experience of it. In terms of my own practice it is important to consider the implications of a certain image in a project. If you were choosing and image for a calendar of Big Ben for example you can disregard some photos immediately. However when you start getting down to your final selection it becomes more about gut instinct as to which you go for. This gut instinct process is something to build upon and recognise as it’s happening in order to use it in the future.

Along with realising that our interpretation is important,t the way in which we react to  photographs specifically is also important to consider. We immediately associate photography with fact, the subject of the photo was there in the frame at that time. This can create feelings of nostalgia, or sadness when we look at someone we know to be dead. This reaction is different to that of a painting of someone we know has died. This is because a painting can be created using only the imagination, they may have never met the subject, and so we do not emote with it as readily.

There is also an important distinction to be made between a photograph and a film. A moving image is much more impermanent, with a photo we know the subject is never going to move out of the frame. It is more permanent, much like a book in comparison to a blog. We can rely upon the book remaining the way it is, containing the same information in the same way. Whereas the blog feels less permanent, the author could delete it in a second or the connection could crash and your reading of it finish. Another ‘moving’ version of the traditional book is an audio book. It carries with it the impermanence of speech, its movement making it feel more fragile.