- What has Occurred Only Once: Barthes's Winter Garden/Boltanski's Archives of the Dead by Marjorie Perloff
- Benjamin and the Political Economy of the Photograph by W.J.T. Mitchell
Post a short (two-three paragraph) synopsis of the readings on the class blog. In addition to each text synopsis you are to provide a brief autobiographical summation of the author.
Bring to class quotes and selected visual representations in conjunction with the readings. Note: Select images of personal value (subject matter) not directly addressed in the readings.
What Has Occurred Only Once: Barthes’s Winter Garden / Boltanski’s Archives
ReplyDeleteBy Marjorie Perloff
Notes on the author:
Marjorie Perloff is a literary critic and a Professor at Stanford University. She writes about poetry, intermedia, and the visual arts. She was born in Vienna in 1931 from a Jewish family. In order to escape the Nazi persecution, They had to leave Vienna in 1938.
http://marjorieperloff.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Perloff
Summary
Perloff discusses some of the points Roland Barthes introduced in Camera Lucida. She explains that “the photographic referent” Barthes mentioned is not the meaning of the image but the actual subject who was present in front of the camera. Therefore, as Barthes wrote, “every photograph is a certificate of presence.” He further argued that presence is correlated to death - since the moment captured is forever gone and the photograph becomes a perpetual reminder of what is lost.
She compares two family snapshots with two photographs by French artist Christian Boltanski who has a lot in common with Barthes. Perloff writes: “Like Barthes, he dislikes ‘art photography,’ photography that approaches the condition of painting. For him, too, the interesting photograph is one that provides the viewer with testimony that the thing seen has been, that it is thus.” Barthes defined the way a photograph can catch the viewer’s interest as punctum. According to Perloff the family snapshots, for instance, would only appeal to viewers who know the subjects personally. Similarly, the Winter Garden photograph of Barthes’ mother as a child has a punctum that was and will only be his.
Ashley Riccio
ReplyDeleteWhat has occurred only once
Author
Marjorie Perloff is a poetry scholar and critic. Her and her family were faced with Nazi terror during World War two and immigrated to the United States when she was six and a half. Most of her work is concerned with “explicating the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and, especially, postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts and cultural theory.”
Summary
This reading talks about Barthes and Boltanskis photographs and continues where Barthes left in "The camera Lucida" about where the photograph exist in time. Marjorie says how once a photograph is produced, It no longer exist. That was a once in a lifetime moment that will never exist again. The photograph is now an object, not a moment. It is impossible to reproduce all the variables that went into creating the single photograph.
Marjorie also touches the topic of how a photograph “does not speak truth but a cultural code.” The power of authentication exceeds power of representation. Since a photograph only exist at one moment, no one experiences the photograph the same way. It is specific to each person and everyone can take the meaning of the photograph differently.
Ashley Riccio
ReplyDeleteBenjamin and the political economy of the photograph.
This reading was a debate whether photography can be seen as art or not. Whether it is talent or it is just a new piece of technology for the world of reproduction. Benjamin thought of photography as revolutionary tool for the world of art. Benjamin also "refers to the photography industry within political economy as an example of capitalism." Since images can be produced multiple times, the original image loses its aura. Now everyone can have the exact same image.
A big question that occurred throughout the reading was wether photography was really fine art or just an industry. Mitchell then explores through the process of the technical aspects of photography and also the artistic aspects of what makes a photograph fine art. Although it showed that more of the technical aspects of photography overlapped the artistic aspects. But "On the other hand, the dismissal of photography as mere technology is, in Benjamin's view, equally involved in fetishism [inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical power] and idolatry, the sort that tries to exclude the photographic image from the scared objects."
Benjamin And The Political Economy Of The Photograph
ReplyDeleteBy W. J. T. Mitchell
Notes on the author:
W. J. T. Mitchell is an English and Art History Professor at the University of Chicago, a visual art and literature theorist. He is also the editor of “Critical Inquiry,” a quarterly journal that has published issues on public art, pluralism, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, etc.
Summary:
Photography was invented in the nineteen century around the same time Karl Marx did his major writings, as Mitchell points out. Marx considered Photography to be just “another kind of industry.” However, he believed that literature and the visual arts should not solely be dedicated to socialist propaganda. Mitchell mentions the “living qualities” of an image; which goes beyond a visual description of appearances. He talks about Walter Benjamin’s essays, which reflect some of Marx’ ideology. Benjamin saw photography as the “first revolutionary means of production” thus changing the function and the effect of Art. For Benjamin, photography is neither art nor just technology, it is just a new form of production. The mechanical aspect of photography compromises the “aura” of the art. Mitchell argues that the aura Benjamin refers to is present in some early photographs and mentions photographers such as Nadar, Stelzner, Bayard, and Pierson.
Mitchell brings up discussions on the status of photography as fine art and talks about Edelman who is interested in the medium as a “legal fiction.” Indeed, photographers had to be creators in order to be protected under copyright laws in the capitalist system.
Mitchell
ReplyDeleteEnglish and Art history professor at the university of chicago. He has an extreme interest in visual culture and developing a science of images. He has ongoing efforts to rethink visual culture as a form of life and light in media art.