Tag Archives: roland barthes

Variations

Posted by on June 2, 2012 Comments Off




Since my last few posts I have added the “final cut” of my recent images to my website in a new section titled “Musicking”. Unlike on this blog no direct association to specific pieces of music is made, which was always my intention. To categorise these images I revisited, as I often do, the writings on Semiology of Roland Barthes (for a discussion see here) and thus, indirectly, came across the term “Musicking”, originally coined by the musicologist Christopher Small (see here). Small’s theories on music making struck a chord with me and the use of his term seemed entirely appropriate here to express some of the thoughts I have on music and the visual arts (or more properly the function of art in general and the process of “making” art).

The images above are intended for a new subsection which will be called “Handmade – Variations On a Theme”. The “Handmade” part of the title is a small nod to one of the inspirations for the images, “Dead Ends Died Out, Examined (1993)” by Damien Hirst. In Hirst’s piece all the butts used are from “pre-made” or manufactured (which, ironically, literally means “hand made”!) cigarettes whereas all of mine are hand rolled! There is a broader aspect too, however, which I also wished to explore: in the making of these images I used fully automatic camera settings (hence the variations in tone, white balance etc.) I was also shall we say a little cavalier in not being overly concerned about vibrating the tripod as I manually tripped the shutter; some of the images are, indeed, slightly blurred. Far from being concerned over these “mistakes” I actively embraced them and it is, I think, true to say that such “imperfections” add an air of the “hand made” to the finished grid of images, consistent perfection being something more readily associated with the machine made. The irony here being, that had I in fact taken care of the technical aspect “by hand”, manually as it were, the images would have all looked more or less the same (technically that is)! I shall be discussing further aspects of the “hand made” in some future posts with more “image variations” from this series.

The other part of the title is a hint as to the musical associations here: Variations on a theme being a much used musical notion or device. Largely through the influence of my friend, composer and painter Marc Yeats, I have given much thought as to how such concepts of “variations’, or the re-use, recycling, of individual themes and elements may be explored in visual art too both through choice of subject matter and treatment.

Accordingly I have chosen, as musical accompaniment, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, “Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach, composer for the royal court of Poland and the Electoral court of Saxony, Kapellmeister and Director of Choral Music in Leipzig. Nuremberg, Balthasar Schmid, publisher.” (sic!). The choice of performer is deliberate too as it relates very much in my mind to Barthesian concepts of musical “grain” (his “grain of the voice”) and also to Small’s notion of “musicking” (see links in text above). The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was undoubtedly one of the 20th Century’s finest exponents of Bach’s keyboard works (and certainly my personal favourite) but both as a man and, in the opinion of many, musically he was not without his “flaws”. Eccentricity in personal habits and performance were indeed something of a “trademark” for him (read more here). The single aspect of his performing that drove some to distraction was his habit of “vocalising” as he played. If you listen carefully here you will actually hear him “singing along” as he plays. For some this, and it must be admitted myriad other tics and eccentricities, especially as regards the tempi he would take many pieces at, almost disqualified him from being taken seriously. To me it simply makes him all the more human and for me that is a priceless trait in any great performer…

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould

Nature Represented

Posted by on December 29, 2011 Comments Off




“…this quality of [photographic] presence would seem to be just the opposite of . . . [Walter Benjamin's] notion of the aura: in the presence of a photograph, one is only presented with a copy. Is this a copy of some original? No. For even this copy is only the copy of a copy: “representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation”: the photographic presence is the assertion of the absence of an original, and not only is the represented thing itself not necessary, but, more fundamentally, the original’s autonomous, a priori existence is to be denied.

Roland Barthes’s description of the tense of photography as the “having been there” [must] be interpreted in a new way. The presence that such photographs have for us is the presence of déjà vu, nature as already having been seen, nature as representation.”

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, Douglas Crimp

Doomed To Analogy

Posted by on December 17, 2011 Comments Off

“No sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something: humanity seems doomed to analogy.”

Roland Barthes

A Ghostly Presence

Posted by on November 1, 2011 Comments Off

“The nature of the medium as an indexical imprint of the object means that any photographed object or person has a ghostly presence, an uncanniness that might be likened to the return of the dead.”

Margaret Iversen

“For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intently) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.”

Roland Barthes

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

For Me Too, Only Studium

Posted by on October 12, 2011 Comments Off

“It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the setting, the actions.

The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time is it not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exist to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that is also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely these marks are so many points.

This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like.”

“…It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ”ordinary“; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Striking a Pose

Posted by on September 17, 2011 Comments Off

“Adopting a pose to define themselves, they apply self control and self portrayal to exert a positive influence on the photographic objectification of themselves or their family.”

Hubertus Butin

“I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’. I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.”

Roland Barthes

“Striking a pose means respecting oneself and demanding respect.”

Pierre Bourdieu

Day Two, Steps 1… 2… 3…

Posted by on July 19, 2011 Comments Off

“The magic of photography is that it is the object which does all the work. Photographers will never admit this and will argue that all the originality lies in their inspiration and their photographic interpretation of the world. As a result they take photographs which are either bad or too good, confusing their subjective vision with the reflex miracle of the photographic act.”

Jean Baudrillard

“In art it is difficult to say something which is just as good as saying nothing at all.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It has taken some time but I have increasingly come around to the view that there is much truth in what Baudrillard says in the quote above (well, not just Baudrillard, Barthes, for one, has said much the same). I say “come around” because I’m not totally in agreement (being a photographer probably has something to with that and most likely explains my reticence to fully “let go” of my illusions, if “illusions” they indeed be…). In truth, I still hold fast to the belief that a truly great photographic image (and here I probably still mean “print”; a physical object in other words) can indeed be a thing of beauty, an “art object”, in its own right. Albeit that I still feel a little uncomfortable with the realisation that the values attached to what is, after all, a potentially infinitely reproducible article (the more so in our brave new digital world) have been artificially constructed and inflated to suit the needs of a burgeoning art market in such “objects”. Be that as it may, I find myself more interested now in actually what a photograph (and here I almost mean any photograph) is, or can be. Or more precisely what it may mean, how it may mean and what it is possible for it to express. Or in other words how much of any notional meaning is actually communicable to the viewer with any degree of reliability.

To answer my own question, especially in the case of the single, “one off”, “art object” photographic image I have come to the conclusion, “not very much…”. And here I should explain I refer to “meaning” as to the intent of the photographer, not meanings and associations as projected onto an image by the viewer according to how an individual may “read” it. In fact the whole notion of “reading” a photographic image is, in itself, problematic… a discussion for another day, another post, however. At any rate, the upshot of all this pondering, which may or may not be of any interest to the reader, is that I no longer feel a need to chase the chimera of the “beautiful”, “elegant” (and all those other terms people use to describe an “eye-catching” image) single, one-off image (dare I say the “masterpiece”?), something of which I have been as guilty of as anybody, even when I may have appeared to work in discrete “series”. Perhaps more than a little Baudrillardean logic has infused me, after all. Perhaps there is no need, any longer, to try quite so hard. At least for the issues I now seek to explore, it has maybe become an unnecessary “distraction”…

As related to the images I showed yesterday, the image above actually precedes them (not as images, obviously, but in their “treatment”). Looking at the image it is fairly self evident that it “represents” a sort of map of my perambulation around my garden. If indeed “reading” an image is possible, this one would seem straightforward. But there is also more than that to it. My close friend Anna Lee Keefer has referred to the image as the “shape” of my walk, which seems as succinct a description as I could imagine. You will notice that, starting from the bottom, at first my “steps” before stopping and taking a snap appear to be short ones, lengthening as I progress. I should add that the composite image here is a faithful representation of both the shape of my garden and the points where I stopped to take a snap. On the face of it, this “lengthening” of my steps establishes a kind of “rhythm” to the walk. It could mean (“mean” as in depict a fact) I sped up as I progressed. What it actually “means”, or shows, quite prosaically, is that I rapidly realised that at the rate I was stopping and photographing I would end up with an unwieldy number of images and so I “slowed down” not in speed but in my rate of stopping and image making, adjusting accordingly so that I could “represent” the shape of the garden in the subsequent composite image. No more, no less. In the end, I like the “rhythm” thus established. That is purely accidental, however.

In the sense I have described above the resulting images, especially in the composite shown here, may or may not be appealing to anyone (they may like the resulting “shape” for example). But it is pure documentary, honest and faithful too, of an act which, as I have “performed” it hundreds (if not thousands) of times before, is of little interest to me per se and I see no reason why it should be of any interest to anybody else. A photographic record of a purely banal act resulting in individually banal images. It is through the banal that I believe, however, is the best route to exploring the formal issues of photography that I spoke of above. Indeed, banality is, I believe, a crucial aspect of the photographic enterprise as opposed to the “heroic” image making of say, Ansel Adams et al, which speak of many things perhaps, but have little to say about the essence of photography, or indeed image making in general. But on that, to some no doubt, “heretical” note I shall leave the discussion for a future post…