User:THY/ Camera lucida
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
New words:
Compilation: sự biên soạn
Misplace: Thất lạc, đặt nhầm chỗ
Labyrinth: mê cung
Intractable reality (Tractable: easily dealt with)
Scrutiny: sự nghiên cứu kĩ
Defiance: sự thách thức -> Defiant attitude: tỏ a thách thức
Ethnological: thuộc về dân tộc học
Ontology: the part of philosophy that studies what it means to exist
Empirical: thực nghiệm -> Empirical evidence
Conceive (v): Quan niệm, tưởng tượng = come up with
Derive: xuất phát từ
Anguish: nỗi đau
Heaustocopy: seeing one's own body at a distance
Part 1
Duality characteristic of photograph: Studium and Punctum
-Studium: Range of meanings available and obvious to everyone. These meanings can be taken at a glance (without effort or 'thinking')
-Punctum: The desire to study and understand what the meaning is in a photograph. Relationship between meaning and our subjectivity.
The Punctum is intense private meaning, which is not easily communicated through/with language.
The Punctum is 'historical' as an experience of the irrefutable indexicality of the photograph*.
- Photography is indexical insofar as the represented object is “imprinted” by light and the chemical (or electronic) process on the image, creating a visual likeness that possesses a degree of accuracy and “truthfulness” unattainable in purely iconic signs such as painting, drawing, or sculpture.
=> Does this mean that there is a higher level of consciousness in painting, drawing, or sculpture because the artist has to 'create' everything? And therefore artists of such practices have somehow more control over the messages perceived by spectators. Meanwhile, in photography, photographers can choose to focus on specific subjects and therefore sometimes 'ignore' the surrounding environment. Although the signs of a photograph can still be manipulated on the editing process, there is still more space for interpretations differs from the artist's original intentions. '
The Punctum characteristic is what attracts and hold the viewer's gaze; it pricks or wound observers. It is as if the photograph brings out consciousness
The Punctum is a blind field, a kind of subtle beyond. It is what the photographer adds to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.
"a Photograph allows sight of self, not as a mirror, but an access point into a definition of identity 'true being, not resemblance'".
=> My "self" never coincide with my image.
"The photograph is the advent of myself as other: A cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity"
=> Barthes doesn't believe in "lifelike" photograph, but it animates him: this is what created every adventure.
"I want to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, I think
=> See, feel, notice, observe, think are stages to judge your engagement levels on the photographs.
"Photography, to surprise, photographs the notable, but soon by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs".
"Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks".
Part 2
"In photography, you can never deny the thing that has been there...of reality and the past"
=> It does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain, what has been.
"Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its reference"
=> Photography corresponds to the explosion of private into public or rather into the creation of social value.
"Photographic ritual"
=> we pose, we present ourselves, our essence. Our body always signifies meanings.
Photography objectifies us
=> our fragments or if our body being viewed by the photographer - mediator.