Monthly Archives: October 2011

An Insecure Presence

Posted by on October 31, 2011 Comments Off


“…the networked snapshot is overlooked not simply because it is bland, banal and repetitious but also because it is a non-object. And it is not just in the sense in which photographs always had an insecure presence as an object through their role as signifiers that we tend to look through rather than look at. Within online networks the individual snapshot is stripped of the fragile aura of the photographic object as it becomes absorbed into a steam of visual data. By giving up the attributes of a photograph as a unique, singular and intentional presence, the networked snapshot is becoming difficult to comprehend with the conceptual tools of visual literacy and photographic theory. The comparative silence of photographic theorists in regard to vernacular photography online could, in part, be due to this.”

Daniel Rubinstein, A Life More Photographic

Natural Magic

Posted by on October 30, 2011 Comments Off

“The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic’, and may be fixed forever in the position which seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy… Such is the fact, that we may receive on paper the fleeting shadow, arrest it there and in the space of a single minute fix it there so firmly as to be no more capable of change.”

William Henry Fox Talbot


An oak tree in winter, William Henry Fox Talbot, c.1842-3

The Level Of Production

Posted by on October 29, 2011 Comments Off

“Barthes noted that at the ‘level of production’, ‘the photograph is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional or ideological norms’ and at the ‘level of reception’, the photograph ‘is not not only perceived, received, it is read, connected by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs’. Reading a photograph involved relating it to a ‘rhetoric’. In addition to the photographic techniques already noted, he refers for instance to the signifying functions of: postures, expressions and gestures; the associations evoked by depicted objects and settings; sequences of photographs, e.g. in magazines (which he refers to as ‘syntax’); and relationships with accompanying text. He added that ‘thanks to the code of connotation the reading of the photograph is… always historical; it depends on the reader’s “knowledge” just as though it were a matter of a real language, intelligible only if one has learned the signs’.”

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners

Message Without a Code

Posted by on October 28, 2011 Comments Off

“In ‘The Photographic Message’ (1961), Roland Barthes famously declared that ‘the photographic image… is a message without a code’. Since this phrase is frequently misunderstood, it may be worth clarifying its context with reference to this essay together with an essay published three years later – ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’. Barthes was referring to the ‘absolutely analogical, which is to say, continuous’ character of the medium. ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to conceive of an analogical code (as opposed to a digital one)?’. The relation between the signifier and the thing signified is not arbitrary as in language. He grants that photography involves both mechanical reduction (flattening, perspective, proportion and colour) and human intervention (choice of subject, framing, composition, optical point-of-view, distance, angle, lighting, focus, speed, exposure, printing and ‘trick effects’). However, photography does not involve rule-governed transformation as codes can. ‘In the photograph – at least at the level of the literal message – the relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not one of “transformation” but of “recording”’. Alluding to the indexical nature of the medium, he notes that the image is ‘captured mechanically’ and that this reinforces the myth of its ‘objectivity’. Unlike a drawing or a painting, a photograph reproduces ‘everything’: it ‘cannot intervene within the object (except by trick effects)’. ‘In order to move from the reality to the photograph it is in no way necessary to divide up this reality into units and to constitute these units as signs, substantially different from the object they communicate; there is no necessity to set up… a code, between the object and its image’. In consequence, he noted, photographs cannot be reduced to words.”

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners

Learning To Read

Posted by on October 27, 2011 Comments Off

“The Gestalt principles can be seen as reinforcing the notion that the world is not simply and objectively ‘out there’ but is constructed in the process of perception.”

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners

“…a useful habit formed by our brains must not be mistaken for an essential attribute of reality. Just as we must learn to read an image, we must learn to read the physical world. Once we have developed this skill (which we do very early in life), it is very easy to mistake it for an automatic or unlearned process, just as we may mistake our particular way of reading, or seeing, for a natural, ahistorical and noncultural given.”

Bill Nichols (1981): Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media

The World Itself

Posted by on October 26, 2011 Comments Off

“Perception depends on coding the world into iconic signs that can represent it within our mind. The force of the apparent identity is enormous, however. We think that it is the world itself we see in our “mind’s eye”, rather than a coded picture of it”

Bill Nichols (1981): Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media.

Decoding The Cues

Posted by on October 23, 2011 Comments Off

“What human beings see does not resemble a sequence of rectangular frames, and camerawork and editing conventions are not direct replications of the way in which we see the everyday world. When we look at things around us in everyday life we gain a sense of depth from our binocular vision, by rotating our head or by moving in relation to what we are looking at. To get a clearer view we can adjust the focus of our eyes. But for making sense of depth when we look at a photograph none of this helps. We have to decode the cues.”

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners

“…photography introduced a new way of seeing which had to be learned before it was rendered invisible.”

Elizabeth Chaplin

New Landscapes

Posted by on October 22, 2011 Comments Off

“Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.” (“The true voyage of discovery does not consist of searching for new landscapes, but of having a new pair of eyes.”)

Marcel Proust

Represented Time

Posted by on October 21, 2011 Comments Off

“Real time suggests that represented time (whether mechanical, electronic or digital) can be asymptotic to the instantaneous – with no delay, no distance, no deferral. (…) An extraordinary extended technical reproducibility serves to mimic living flux, the irreversible, spontaneity, that which carries singularity away in the movement of existence without return.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Reality In The Second Degree

Posted by on October 20, 2011 Comments Off

“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”

“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography