Camera Lucida wrote in 1980
- Death of the Author is short assay in which Narties expands on his idea about how we responds to and interpret the messages we are sen through images and texts.
- He was witting quit often words text and image.
- It is important to interpret ate those words meaning so we can have more understanding by reading the author's texts.
- It is up to us what we are going to interpret ate the text about.
- " To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signifies to close the writing"
- Barthes is not simply talking about a literal author, or the individual creator of work. He's talking about the idea that there is some direct transmission process from the creator of a message to the receiver of that message.
- BArthes suggests that all "massages" are constructed with a social and political context (time, place and sensibilities)
- " Text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures"
The reader /viewer has more responsibility to the text than the author. The complexity of the different connotations and experiences that come from the author into the text are hidden when it arrives with the reader.
The death of the author- the creator is giving clear description of the art. You can't translate it in an other way than what you have been given.
Where in Barthes audience and creators has their on interpretation about the Art.
Postmodernism is was introduced is a stand point, and this could be interpret ate in a different meaning.
RIchard Prince was changing the actual Art image and interpret ate it into a different meaning. Like in Malboro advert. Not advertising its own cigarettes but trying to give the image the new meaning.
Camera Lucida 1980
- Unlike his other writings the book is persona and subjective. The book is very personal to him, he writes everything in a first person never in third. Writing his book from his own experience.
- He was trying to send the message what photography is all about (at the time)
- He talks about approach in Camera Lucida where he discuss photography from the perspective of the viewer.
- He talks about travelling. Being there, to take photographs.
- " I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was in itself"
- Barthes is frustrated by the problem of photography which hinges it to reality no photograph without something or someone. He calls it a "fatality"
- He wonders how we see the photograph if we can only see the referent . That's why discussions of photography are concerned with the history and sociology.
- The Operator- The photographer
- The Spectator - The viewer of the photograph
- The spectrum - what is despite in the photograph ( term related to the idea of spectacle ans also spectre )
Observe Subject:
He talks about the posing in a very philosophical way. Not everyone can understand it, so it is important to translate in any possible way for yourself, so you can understand what he was actually writting about. He finds some images intriguing because of their discontinues elements, their heterogeneity they have interest "adventure"
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The image: Koen Wessing : Nicarague 1979
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He defects in these images information that he can recognise and understand and elements in the image that seem to be beyond his understanding.
He goes on to define the two senses he obtains from the photograph.
2nd Key therms:
- Studium- general interest. Something that you have own opinion about it, doesn't have to be something that you don't like as well.
- Punctum - Something that is available for everyone. Refers to the range of photographic meanings available and obvious.
- To inform to present to surprise to course to signify to provoke and desire. It is something you like but you don't necessarily love it.
- It can be also translated as: Unary- the image is a unifies and self - contained. The image dont have much to say . They are not bad photographs just unremarkable.
Punctum : Shared intelectual understanding, Individual...
Not all photographs have this Punctum. No extra spark to it. Because it is something that attracts the attention.
Is not easily communicated through language
Inspires an intensely private meaning in the viewer.
The other view is that you can have your own interpretation about Art but you don;t have to share it with everybody, which means not everyone have to have the same description of the work.
Something that is clearly presented on the image could be completely different story the author of the image.
William Klein: little Italy , New York
Image is about the little's boys missing teeth not the actual clear message ( the gun pointing to little boy's face)
Discernible - Obvious quirkls are not evidence of the punctum - this is a deeply subjective and non-rational response to images.
Example: Image of Nadar - Savorgnan de Brezza, 1882
The hand of one black male crossing the hands it's a punctum relative.
Unmissable , uncoded instantaneous and intense it is the fragment that rouses the docile cultural subject that is the spectator of the stadium. To respond to the punctum , there must an openness to the photograph which based on the spectator's own particular interests.
Barthes makes the point that he conventional flatness or emptiness of the photographed image (which people do not emerge, alive but are rather pinned down, dead or anaesthetised in the still image ) is altered by the discovery of the punctum.
"Nothing surprising is, if sometimes despite its clarity the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph in no longer in from of me and I think back on it".
The Winter Garden photograph
- In Part two of his book, he shifts his search for the essence of the photography from an investigation of many photographers to an intense analysis of just one.
- This is the famous Winter Garden Photograph of his mother which he found in November 1977.
He is not reproducing the image, because for us it would be just a different photograph, another image in the book to flip over.
This is where the identification of photography with death and mourning becomes the strongest. Barthes was writing Camera Lucida shortly after his mother's death.
The discovery of this early photograph of her exposes the distance between them the gulf of time.
....That has been
"....In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there".
Example; Alexander Gardner: Portrait of Lewis Payne in 1865 (just before he was about to be hanged )
In the future anterior tense of the photograph, Payne is both dead and is going to die.
Although s "still, every photographs always represents this passing of the time from the future".
" I no know that there exists another punctum than the "detail" . This new punctum which is no longer of form but of intensity is Time. the locating emphasis of the noene. It's pure presentation"
Punctum doesn't always have to be about the family or people, it maybe a photography about the tragedy about something that have happened.
Image Example: Andre Kertesz: Ernest , Paris 1931
Next week Seminar: Find a photograph that identify with personal studium. Something that tells a story about anything. Something that I like or not necessarily love.
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