This has been an interesting week for getting to grips with reading photographs, understanding what a photograph “is” versus what it “represents” and how a photographer has to encapsulate both aspects in their work. Various authors have expressed this in different ways and I’ve pulled highlighted two that, as starting points, resonate with me:
“The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seems so. It was the photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choice in terms of the latter”.
Szarkowski, J. The Photographer’s Eye. (2018). 7th edn. New York: Museum of Modern Art. pp introduction.
“The Studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste”. “…..a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity”… “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me is poignant to me”.
Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. (2000). London: Vintage. Pp 26/27.
I particularly like Barthes idea of the Studium versus the Punctum and thedifferent levels of personal response to an image . The Studium is also described as the “historical” interest (ibid: 57) and the ,“field of cultural interest” (ibid: 94) – ie a cultural or intellectual response to an image – whereas the Punctum is more of an emotional reaction to the image, highly subjective, and closely bound to the viewer or “spectator”.
Elsewhere, Barthes also uses the terms “denotation” (what can be readily identified from an image) and “connotation” (the underlying message that is being conveyed by the image), which are both closely linked to the semiological terms of “signifier” and “signified”.
I had not really thought about photographs before in this way, but combining these ideas with the very detailed taxonomy which Paul Martin Lester sets out and discusses in his article “Visual Communication: images with messages (Visual Analysis) published by Wadsworth, I feel I have a much better framework with which to assess and understand photographs that I now come across.
Perhaps the most important lesson from the week though was the importance context in any analysis of an image. Viewing an image without any background knowledge or context is a dangerous and fruitless game that can lead to all sorts of mis-interpretations, as well as potentially missing out on a wealth of information that should rightly belong with the image. The importance of context is well illustrated by John A Walker in his introduction to “Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning” in The Camerawork Essays1, where he shows that an image can carry very different meanings depending on the context in which it is viewed or shown. In addition, the photographer has to be mindful that the viewer comes to an image with “memories, knowledge [and] prejudices” and that there is therefore also a “mental set or context” to be taken into account. He sums it up in a quasi, but very apt, warning “Context is a troublesome determinant of meaning for artists because so often it lies outside their control”.
This week has made me particularly of two things.
One is the importance of really looking at a photographer’s body of work as a while and not just individual images, and reading what the photographer has said about their own work, and looking at the socio-cultural and historical events through which they worked, in order to really understand their work in as broad a context as possible.
The second is the importance of thinking hard about how my own images might be presented, and where (book, exhibition, as single images or a series) and to provide enough background information, if appropriate in the context, for the viewer to be able to access the images fully.
Evans, Jessica ed. (1997). The Camerawork Essays: Context and Meaning in Photography. London: Rivers Oram Press.