A photograph is uncanny through its reflection of death. This is in turn expressed by the photograph’s connections with its double, and in its riddling of reality and its temporal state. Barthe’s narratives in Camera Lucida heavily discusses the parallels of photography and death, and what this connection implies. According to Barthes, what we capture in the camera is a single fleeting moment in existence; it reproduces the image of a single situation happening once that may never be recreated as it passes. The picture taken, however, preserves and thus infinitely repeats the moment within the photograph. As soon as the image is captured, its subject or situation may no longer exist in reality, but always does so in the photograph.
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We see them posing in front of the camera, and we know they will die; yet as soon as the moment depicted has passed, the girls are dead, both in the moment depicted and soon after the train kills them in the accident. Ultimately, these indexical signs are most reflective when the viewer’s own experiences are applied. The giving and taking between the viewer’s experiences and emotions and the object is what revives the dead moments in photographs. This theatrical trait is noted by Barthes as like a “body simultaneously living and dead,” (31). Photographs preserves past moments as eternal images, but they are ultimately dead, and only come to life within the mind through interpretations of the viewer, and it is when such relations occur that photography truly achieve its goal in portraying life.
Photography, in a sense, is a logic that constantly haunts itself, and its indexicality continues to fuel philosophical debates on meanings of death. Analysing a photograph in terms of punctum and studium signs show the many alternatives on how to think or see about a photograph, and the impact an individual feels upon viewing a photograph heavily relies on the signs its image conveys shows how unique and powerful these ideas
Having such an image before our eyes, often we fail to recognize the message it is trying to display from a certain point of view. Through Clark’s statement, it is evident that a photograph holds a graphic message, which mirrors the representation of our way of thinking with the world sights, which therefore engages other
The role of photography is questioned; he asks, what about photography makes it a valid medium? We read about the operator (the photographer), spectrum (the subject) and spectator (the viewer), also about the stimulus (what we see in the photograph) and the punctum (the unclassifiable, the thing that makes the photograph important to the viewer). According to Barthes, the photograph is an adventure for the viewer, but it is ultimately death, the recording of something that will be dead after the picture is taken. This idea is the main focus of Barthes’ writing, the photograph “that-has-been”, in Latin “interfuit: what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject; it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred” (Barthes, 76).... ...
Death has been widely portrayed in Art throughout the centuries, the most depicted death scene possibly being the death of Christ. Every death scene is not created equal, despite the fact that the works of Art focus on death. The feelings, symbolism, and themes that are conveyed by the scene are diverse. To see how varied the effect can be from different death scenes we can look at The Sortie made by the Garrison of Gibraltar by John Trumbull in 1789 and The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West in 1770. It’s interesting to see how these artists depicts their own view on death in these specific works, since in fact West acted as a teacher to Trumbull yet their styles differ dramatically.1, 2 Although both works of art put death at the center of the scene and take place during a War; with the aid of the Artists’ unique styles and directions, completely different interpretations are invoked in the viewers.
The mind is a very powerful tool when it is exploited to think about situations out of the ordinary. Describing in vivid detail the conditions of one after his, her, or its death associates the mind to a world that is filled with horrific elements of a dark nature.
John Mahtesian's photography offers a visual poetry of the human condition. It is a direct expression of his warmth, depth of spirit, and humanity. A true gentleman, extremely humble and unfailingly polite, he achieves an invisibility that is the success of his art. His patience and commitment to his vision allow him to capture moments others could not. If his subjects are aware of his presence, his gentle nature so enchants them that they are unguarded and their essence is revealed. So compelling are his images that we are truly convinced his insights are our own. They make us rejoice in the world around us, and in the nature of human existence.
In the book Maus, by Art Spiegelman, Spiegelman’s images and dark artistic style have a strong connection to the past based on how he has drawn himself, especially in his short story, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” In Spiegelman’s short story, he depicts himself as a guilt-ridden, deformed being, and these depictions intertwine with his past emotions, which correlate strongly to his mother’s suicide. Spiegelman portrays himself as a person with droopy eyes, an altered perspective, and an uneven visage. These particular characteristics form his grotesque physical features and disfigured facial expressions. The manner in which Spiegelman depicts himself conveys the message that his mother’s suicide detrimentally affected him, which his grim physical
According to Paolo Cherchi Usai: “Moving image preservation will be redefined as the science of gradual loss and the art of coping with the consequences, very much like a physician who has accepted the inevitability of death even while he fights for the patient’s life” (Death 24x Second, Laura Mulvey, p17). Furthermore, due to the improving of technology, there is always something been replace by another. Such as analogue camera has been replaced by digital camera, telephone has been replaced by smartphone, and television has been replaced by computer. “… the digital, as an abstract information system, made a break with analogue imagery, finally sweeping away the relation with reality, which had, by and large, dominated the photographic tradition…” (Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey, p18). But fortunately, photography didn’t been replace by film, that is maybe due to a reason of photography has always had its own complex engagement with time and movement which is different with film (Lecture note,
Whilst the relationship which the photograph bears to its subject may be entirely different to the relationship which the painting bears to its subject, this does not necessarily entail that one must reject the photograph as an equally worthy object of aesthetic appreciation. As a final remark, in addition to photography’s capacity to arouse an interest in the subject photographed in a manner that transcends face-to-face viewing, the fact that the photograph boasts the ability to suspend its subject in time is also indicative of its transcendence of face-to-face viewing. If one takes an aesthetic interest in Vivian Maier’s photographs of children playing in a street in the 1950’s, for instance, this would evidently not be equivalent to viewing the same subjects directly in the present moment. As such, the photograph’s ‘distance’ from its subject, both physical and temporal, is perhaps further reason to distinguish it from face-to-face seeing, and may be indicative of its worth as a visual art form. Thus, contra Scruton, paintings and photographs are equally worthy of aesthetic appreciation as visual art forms, and photographic transparency is not synonymous with photographic
This book is a note written by Roland Barthes to record the dialectical way he thought about the eidos(form, essence, type, species) of Photographs. Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist in his lifetime, but surprisingly he was not a photographer. As Barthes had a belief that art works consists with signs and structures, he had investigated semiotics and structuralism. However, through Camera Lucida, he realized the limitation of structuralism and the impression to analyze Photography with only semiotics and structuralism. Barthes concludes with talking about unclassifiable aspects of Photography. I could sense the direction Barthes wanted to go through the first chapter ‘Specialty of the Photograph’. He tried to define something by phenomenology
... over time – and the viewer’s personal experience, essentially her history. This gets very near to a common sense perspective – what we look at, and what we think about what we see has much to do with who we are and what we have experienced in life. Thus, art may be described as an interaction between the viewer, influenced by her experiences, with the work of art, inclusive of its history and the stories built up around it over time. When we look at art, we must acknowledge that the image is temporally stretched – there is more to it than meets the eye at present. What we learn from Didi-Huberman’s approach is to give this temporal ‘tension’ its due. Didi-Huberman describes and defends the importance of of how we look at artistic works: images that represent something determinate, while always remaining open to the presentation of something new and different.
“The advent of photography served as a catalyst in challenging the realist tradition that had predominated since the Ren...
Thus it enables a state of being that is in the moment (it is present). The aesthetical (in terms of material aspects) of the body are also something that is a definite variable. When the body undergoes ‘embodiment’ it is the process of the locus, culture, traditions, biological traits of the body (sex, race) that plays a role in the construction of this experience (which happens on a daily basis) and at the same time simultaneously confines it (2009:3). ‘Embodiment’ is forever shifting and growing; as one’s experiences are continuously happening and thus making it a highly subjective experience as well (2009: 4). This process then allows the body to become something that is more than just a biological construct; it allows the body to become something that is able to express itself unto other beings in both words (the patterns developed when one is speaking and the language styles that one has been influenced to use) and non-verbal communication (the shape and form the body takes when moving in space or even sitting or standing still in a space drawn from experienced emotions and the person’s historical, social and political background). Therefore it is suggested that ‘embodiment’ is something that is a network of interlinked signs showing past experiences and continuously reshaping and forming to show new signs based on new experience (Thapan 2009:
It is almost hard to deny the existence and presence of spirits, good or evil, when studying art and literary theory. Do these spirits stand as an independent force completely separate from our imagination, or is ‘evil spirit’ simply a pseudonym given to the darker layers of the subconscious that some artists are not afraid to utilize in order to create shocking, however powerful images and statements? These images and ideas may be at times disquieting, yet they are still relatable since we as humans all have those dreary, somber places within ourselves. The reason that these might make us as the viewer feel uncomfortable is because not everyone is prepared to go down those dark and ominous hallways of our minds.
Photojournalism plays a critical role in the way we capture and understand the reality of a particular moment in time. As a way of documenting history, the ability to create meaning through images contributes to a transparent media through exacting the truth of a moment. By capturing the surreal world and presenting it in a narrative that is relatable to its audience, allows the image to create a fair and accurate representation of reality.
In Sontag’s On Photography, she claims photography limits our understanding of the world. Though Sontag acknowledges “photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures”, she believes “the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” She argues photographs offer merely “a semblance of knowledge” on the real world.