Essay draft

With writing this essay would like to focus on broadening my knowlegde about photography as such. What is it? What does it mean? What has been written about it? As a way of getting answers to these questions I have selected two texts: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes and the Ontology of the Photographic Image by Andre Bazin. I consider this essay not to give me all the answers yet (photography has after all changed a lot since these these two texts have been written) but hopefully this can be the start of deepening my understanding of photography and what place it has and will have in the future.

A photograph can be the object of three actions: to do, to undergo, to look. Barthes names them in the following order: the Operator, the Spectrum and the Spectator.

Barthes’ book mainly analyses from the Spectators perspective. The book is a subjective, personal and sentimental essay about photography as well as mourning and perhaps, death. In fact, he started writing it after his mother passed away. It is considered one of the most influential books on photography. Strangely enough his analysis is very subjective and sometimes even states the obvious and the common-sense. As Barthes adresses to his future critics in the last chapter: “What! A whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance?” (Barthes, 1980, p. 115). However this way of writing does not make the book less valuable, as it is quite poetic, yet also makes one question what the photographic image entails. In the first part, Barthes describes that he was “overcome by an ontological desire”. In his words he wanted to learn what photography is “in itself” and by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images (painting for instance). He did this through “making himself the measure of photographic knowledge. He especially wanted to know why certain photographs attracted him so powerfully, and what exactly there is in a photo that sets him off. He therefore distinguishes two themes in photography that co-exist next to eachother: the studium and the punctum.

The studium is the general interest one has in certain photographs. The word coming from Latin, means something like; a taste of something, or a kind of general enthusiastic commitment. This is decided culturally, it depends on ones education/knowledge. On the other side, but existing simultaniously next to it, the punctum is something that makes one fall in love with a photo, that pricks one. A detail that animates the Specter and takes him outside of the frame. It is a kind of subtle beyond.

In the Ontology of the Photographic Image, Bazin argues that photography is the most important event in the history of the plastic arts because it has freed Western painting from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy. He also believes in a certain objectivity of the photograph. While a photograph is mechanically produced, other forms of images such as paintings appear to be a pure subjective reflection of what the artist sees. A painting can not truly represent the world in an objective way, it’s always created by the hand of the artist. So a chair painted by the artist is referring to what the painter sees as a chair, the chair is not referring to an actual chair but to a chair that the artist believes a chair should look like. Painting can not get rid of this untrustworthy image. Strangely enough, Barthes only mentions Bazin once, and only in relation to cinema. Their idea of photograph as fingerprint of reality are described in both texts in slightly different ways. Barthes said “every photograph is a certificate of presence”. (Barthes, 1980, p. 87). While Bazin put it like: “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picturemaking. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.”(Bazin, 1945, p13/14). He also compares the photograph to the deathmask, which likewise involves a certain automatic process. Both take a ‘mold’ or impression of an object that once existed.

In part two of Camera Lucida, Barthes finds a new punctum, which is a shock caused by “that-has-been”. He sees this as the noeme [essence] of photography. This essence derives from the realization that the object that is represented, has been, and no longer exists. The photograph has no continuity, it is a moment frozen in time.

This he concluded by looking at a photo of his then 5 year old mother: the Winter Garden photo. Because she passed away he was searching for a photographs that could represent her essence, or her ‘air’. He found this in the Winter garden photo. Barthes does not show us the image as it would only interest our studium.“[...]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.) (Barthes, 1980, p. 73). Yet to him this photograph contained something like an essence of all photographs, the “that-has-been”.

Barthes also illustrates this by looking at a photograph of Lewis Payne in his cell waiting to be hanged, taken by Alexander Gardner. Barthes describes the punctum here like this: “But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.” (Barthes, 1980, p.96). This photograph doesn’t only deal with ‘that-has-been’ but also with ‘that-will-be’. The Specter now experiences the distance between the moment in the past and the moment of observation. What I understand by this is that Barthes actually means that time is the most important aspect in photography.

Bazin is more focussed on an anthropologic study of the photograph. How humanity and the arts evolved and what the influence of photography was on this. He starts by explaining that in Ancient Egypt the dead were embalmed to make sure they could take their bodies to the afterlife. To ensure this afterlife, terra cotta statuettes were used as substitutes for the body just in case something would happen to the original body. According to Bazin “This lays bare the primordial function of statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life.” (Bazin, 1945, p.09). So they believed by representing the body through a statue, thus giving it a magical function, people could survive death.

Eventually this magical function was relieved from the arts. As civilization and art progressed “no one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death” (Bazin, 1945, p.10).

In the fifteenth century onwards, symbolic realism was not the most important aspect in arts anymore. Western painting tried to recreate the outside world as realistic as possible. This was caused by the invention of the first mechanical system of reproduction: perspective. With the invention of the Camera Obscura, artists were now able to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space. “Thenceforth Painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model[spiritual real]; the other purely psychological , namely the duplication of the world outside.”[psychological real](Bazin, 1945, p.11). This shows that artists not only wanted to show the spiritual real of the world anymore but also depict the world as realistic as possible.

In the nineteenth century photography finally freed the plastic arts from their “resemblance complex”. For the first time an image was created automatically. A direct vingerprint of the world was left on the light sensitive plate.

“This production of automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picturemaking. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.” (Bazin, 1945, p. 13/14). In the digital age this credibility is questionable. The light reflected on the sensor in the digital camera is translated into binary code, which adds an extra layer of coding and de-coding. Besides, manipulation has become integral part of digital photography. Of course this already happened in analogue photography, but this was easier to trace. Now we can hardly trace the origin of the images, and the truthfullness of photography has become even more questionable.

Conclusion:

Photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts. To conclude I can state that the most important aspect of photography is time. The photograph is a moment frozen in time. It has no continuity, this makes it's nature ambigious.

Since the invention of the camera one is able to make a more truthfull reproduction of reality. This objectivity enherent to photography changed the way we look at images, and also had a huge impact on humanity. I never really believed in the objectivity of the photograph, apart from that the object had to really exist in order to become a photograph. I guess the objectivity has also been re-evaluated now that most photographs have become digital and easy to manipulate with for example Photoshop.

Bibliography:

Barthes, R (1980) Camera Lucida, Editions du Seuil
Bazin, A (1945) What is Cinema?, University of California Press