Vcs 06 Photography

8/8/2019 Vcs 06 Photography

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1. Introduction to theories of photography

2. Introduction to semiotics, followed by a review of Peirces semiotics as they pertain to photography

3. Introduction to structuralism, followed byBarthess theory in Camera lucida

Organization of this lecture:


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1. Introduction: Photography and Theory

Photography has an increasingly complicated body of theory that

supports (or seeks to support) its practice.

As a preliminary assessment:

A. Literature in the origins of photography, tracing it for example from the camera obscura (Peter Galassi) or from capitalism, science, and leisure (Jonathan Crary)

B. Literature in the theory of photographyinvestigating claims of its pictorial nature (Joel Snyder)using semiotics to explain photographic images (Rosalind Krauss)

C. Literature in the place of photography in relation to ne arton vernacular photography (Graham Smith, History of Photography )on surrealism and women photographers (Rosalind Krauss)


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Peter GalassiRosalind Krauss Joel SnyderGraham Smith

Jonathan Craryphotography as a ne art

Concepts, names, and works

In the last twenty years, photography has been increasingly accepted as ane art: there are now more museums with a Photography Department,

and more professors of the history and theory of photography in arthistory departments

Photography is still a difcult sell in the market and in academia; and inmuseums, photography departments are often small...


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Charles Peircesemioticssymbol sign

Concepts, names,

and works

In this lecture we will sample two theories that have been used tounderwrite photography.

The rst is a semiotic theory, which relies on a reading of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, and American philosopher and mathematician.(Pronounced purse.)

The part of Peirces work that is relevant here is his theory of semiotics.

Semiotics: the study of how meaning is generated and disseminated by

means of symbols. For example, the word dog denotes the concept dog; what is the relation between them?

(The word symbol is not used in semiotics because it has the connotationof heavily culturally loaded meanings: the crucix is a symbol in thatsense.)

2. Semiotic theories of photography


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There are two principal sources for semiotics:

Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), Charles Peirce (1839-1914).

The two theories are wholly different and do in different directions:Saussures is linguistic (we encountered him in relation to Lacan), andPeirces is epistemological (i.e., having to do with theories of knowledge).

A normal starting place for theories of semiotics are the two conceptssignier and signied.

Signier (sometimes just called the sign, although that term should be thegeneral one):

French: signiant.The physical medium (sound, image, etc.).For example: the sound (phonemes) of the word dog

Signied:French: signi.The meaning of the word dog

Ferdinand Saussuresigniersignied

Concepts, names,

and works


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Other terms useful in semiotics:

Syntax, syntactics:The relations between signs within language or any system of meaning

For example: the relations between subject, verb, and objector the relations between forms, objects, or colors in an artwork

Semantics:The relations between the signs in the system of meaning and the worldFor example: the relation between a photographed tree and the tree

Pragmatics:The study of the operation of signs in language

syntaxsemantics

pragmatics

Concepts, names,and works


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(More terms useful in semiotics)

Dense, disjoint (= analog, digital)

These terms are from another philosopher who contributed to semiotics, Nelson Goodman(1906-1998)

Roughly, in his work dense signs are those with no boundaries, for example brushmarks in an oilpainting Disjoint signs have boundaries, for example letters in a word, which have white spaces

Goodman called those analog and digital (he was thinking of watches)

In Saussure a similar concept of disjointness is called oppositional: language, he wrote, is a systemof opposed signs, creating meaning by a system of difference:

No signs (for example, the word dog ) have meaning intrinsically, but they accrue meaning by theirdifferential opposition to other terms ( cat, giraffe, wolf...)

Nelson Goodmandensedisjoint

Concepts, names,and works:

oppositionalsystem of differenceanalog, digital


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Semiotics in Peirces system:

For Peirce a sign is by its nature triadic, since Peirce defines it assomething which stands to somebody for something in somerespect or capacity.

Hence every sign has three divisions: the sign in itself, the sign asrelated to its object, and the sign as interpreted to represent anobject.

FirstmessSecondnessThirdness

Division of signsInterpretant


The rudimentary diagram of perspective for example (see lecture onLacan) consists of the observing subject, the seen object, and thepicture.

Here the first division, the sign in itself, is the middle term of thediagram, the second, the sign as related to its object, becomes thecombination of the middle and the right of the diagram, and the third,the sign as interpreted to represent an object, corresponds to theentire diagram.

Peirce often calls this relation firstness, secondness, thirdness: signs

in themselves, signs in relations to others signs, and signs thatcannot be separated from laws and relations


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The element of Peirces semiotics that has been used to denephotography is the triad icon, index, symbol.

All signs, Peirce says, are partly iconic (they denote by resembling their objects),indexical (they are really affected by their objects), and symbolic (they denote byvirtue of a law)

For example:

A photograph of a tree resembles the tree, and so it is an iconic sign

The smoke from a re is physically affected (caused) by the re, so it is asign of the reThe word dog denotes the concept dog because of a law (a convention,an agreement); hence it is a symbolic sign

iconindexsymbol



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Theorists of photography have said that photography is an indexical art because the light(photons) physically cause the image.

This would make it unlike painting, for example.

These theorists (Rosalind Krauss, Fred Orton, many others) take only the schematic idea of the index, which is more complicated in Peirces writing.

First problem: Peirce says all signs are simultaneously iconic, indexical, and symbolic:Take, for instance, it rains. Here the icon is the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinkerhas experienced. The index is all whereby he distinguishes that day, as it is placed in his experience. The symbol

is the mental act whereby [he] stamps that day as rainy.

Second problem: it becomes counter-intuitive to insist on indexical or symboliccharacteristics of photography (this is David ONeil):

[A] photograph signifies at least in part iconically by manifesting, for example, the scalar relationships, thesilhouettes and the tonal modulations of its object(s). These features constitute only some of those possessed by

the photograph. Other properties such as its weight, taste, smell, size, and spatial extension are not generallythose which are asked to carry any significatory responsibility. The parameters of iconicity, the selection of properties which will serve as conduits of reference is contractual. Islands of iconicity float in seas of convention


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What is indexical, symbolic, and iconic in a typical photograph?

Iconic: landscape... in a sense, theentire scene is legible because it isiconic

Symbolic: or is it taken to be iconic? In an obvious sense: the castle issymbolic of romantic history,vacations, etc. The dog is symbolic of bourgeois entertainment... but theentire scene could also be argued tobe symbolic: comprehensible because it has conventional meaning.

Indexical: The entire scene could alsobe taken as indexical, since photonscreated it.


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Saying that photography is indexical has at least the following advantages:

1. It ties photography to the anti-transcendental strain in modernism, inwhich nothing is denoted beyond the substance (materiality) of the artobject

2. And therefore it ties photography to minimalism (which stresses thework itself, in its immediate physical presence)

3. It stresses the mechanical nature of photography, and so it helpsdissociate photography from the cult of the artist as genius, which has

been taken since mid-century as a remnant of early modernist andromantic art

anti-transcendentalmaterialityessence of a mediumminimalismartist as genius


And it has at least the following disadvantages:

1. It is a poor (loose, partial) reading of Peirce

2. It is counter-intuitive3. By stressing the essence of the medium, it returns toClement Greenbergs modernist interest in the purity of each mediuman idea that is not often in line withexplorations of multimedia


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2. Roland Barthess Camera lucidaBarthes was also interested in semiotics; his method was often a combination of semiotic analysisand structuralism.

Structuralism: an interpretive method made inuentual by the anthropologist Claude Lve-Strauss.The fundamental notion is to organize the operative concepts of a culture into pairs of opposites,arranged in a semiotic square

For example:

Past Future

Atemporality (negatesboth past and future)

Present (mediates pastand future)

Relation of opposites

Relations of mediatesRelations of negations


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There are at least three philosophic strands in Cameralucida: semiotics, structuralism, and phenomenology.

Phenomenology is a philosophy that stresses theimportance and primacy of appearances, and in

particular those that have bodily meaning (objects made,as Barthes says to the measure of a persons body

Phenomenology is associatwed with Edmund Husserl(1859-1938), and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). Barthes is thinking of Merleau-Ponty when heidenties himself as a phenomenologist.

Merleau-Ponty is important in general to art criticismand art history; he wrote an inuential essay onCzanne.

Barthes is an informal followera group that could also

be said to include such diverse writers as the arthistoran Michael Fried, and the Marxist critic JohnBerger.

Watch, in Camera lucida, to see what Barthes means bycalling himself a heuristic (i.e., informal)phenomenologist

Edmund HusserlMaurice Merleau-Pontyphenomenology



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A bit more background on Barthes:

His essay The Photographic Image is also relevant.

In it he analyzes an Italian ad for a kind of pasta called Panzani.

He imagines the advertisement stripped of its semiotic signicanceits codes as he callsthem.

Imagine the writing (Panzani, etc.) is illegible or absent,the imagine that there is no advertising context,that we dont have knowledge of the objects (tomatoes, mesh bag...)

What is left, he says, is an uncoded image: pure light, visibility, color, but no sense of language

The essay is a strange kind of dead-end in analysis, since there is nothing more that can be said.It is a strategy he does not follow in Camera lucida, although he insists throughout thatphotographs have no intrinsic meaning. (Code appears, however: e.g., p. 51.)

codesuncoded imageThe Photographic Image

Concepts, names,and works:


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Key concepts in Camera lucida, with images for discussion:

1. StudiumThe coded part of the image = the public partA kind of general, enthusiastic commitment (p. 26)A kind of education (p. 28); something that is fully intelligible (p. 57)

U.S.Governmentphoto of afalloutshelter


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2. PunctumThe complementary term to studiumThe uncoded, non-linguistic, purely visual,subjective and personal part of a viewers response to a photoSomething that attacks the eye, makes a mark or sign (p. 25); it entails a blind field (p. 57)

Rick Rocamora,

MentalPatient in

Manila.Fromhttp:// www.pacificnews.org/yo/ photo/manila-children/ rocamora-

mental.html


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3. The emphasis on vernacular photography, as opposed to scientic photographyThe reference is to Sam Doc Edgerton (who made photos of bullets going through balloons)That kind of work is unrelated to the bodys experience of the world because its 1/1,000,000 sec.Is that a convincing argument? (p. 33).

Family photo.From http://www.steve.odell.dial.pipex.com/wimpole/wimpole%20families.shtml


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3. Photographic shock (5 varieties)This is on p. 32. Note the critique at the end of the section.

Andre Kertesz, Horse Dying at His Cart


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4. JouissanceA key term in French psychoanalysis; pleasure in a libidinal sense, not necessarily sexual,but with a sexual overtone. The pleasure of the text is one of Barthess concerns

Bill Brandt photoFrom http://www.radiomontaje.com.ar/homecentro.htm


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5. SimulacrumWhich we have encountered in Guy Debord.An image or a likeness of something: i.e., not the

object itself, but a shadowy substituteBarthes was interested in images as simulacra

especially in The Empire of Signs (on Japan)

JouissancepunctumstudiumshockOperatorvernacular


Tokyo streetFrom http://

www.halfbakery.com/idea/ London_20$1tr_20ono_2e


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6. The Operator On pp. 9, 28: this is a crucial concept for visualstudies

The Operator is the agent who creates the image:understanding the Operator is one of the principal

goals of visual studies analyses

JouissancepunctumstudiumshockOperator


Model withArmani clothesFrom http:// home.enter.vg/ tanita/pictures.htm

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Vcs 06 Photography