roland barthes on photography messagecode signifer (representation)signified (meaning)...
Post on 20-Dec-2015
219 views
TRANSCRIPT
Roland Barthes on photographyMESSAGE CODE
signifer (representation) signified (meaning)
denotation connotation
photograph caption
obvious or informational symbolic
traumatic ideological
“natural” noncode cultural code
records transforms
studium punctum
signifiance
Barthes: Camera Lucida Public / Private responses to the photograph Barthes and the “return” to phenomenology
To define the eidos of photography eidos = appearance, idea, constitutive nature, species What common basis unites all our otherwise different
“encounters” with photography? The noeme or “essence” of photography
What I “intentionalize” in photography is “that-has-been.”
The “intentionality of imagination,” or a purely personal relation to the photograph
Barthes: the eidos of photography The essential nature of our subjective
experience of photography is defined by an irreducible singularity. To experience time as a singular and unrepeatable
event. “Every photograph is a certification of presence” “I want a history of looking” (12), or the irreducibility
of the emotional experience of looking at photographs.
the Spectrum: the experience of being-photographed the Spectator: the desire and emotion aroused by the act
of looking at specific photographs
“. . . The Photograph . . . represents the very subtle moment when . . . I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14).
The studium and the punctum The studium refers to the range of photographic
meanings available and obvious to everyone.
The studium is: Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained
whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance. Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal
comprehensible way.
The studium is: Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained
whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance. Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal
comprehensible way.
The studium and the punctum The punctum (Latin) = trauma (Greek)
inspires an intensely private meaning “escapes” language--it is not easily
communicated through linguistic resources is “historical,” as an experience of the
irrefutable indexicality of the photograph The punctum as a “partial object” or detail
that attracts and holds my gaze. The photograph is a temporal
hallucination (115). the photographic and the filmic images
The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination . . . .” (115).