Barthes felt fluffy. Most of the readings earlier in the semester were structured by examples and classification using an analysis framework. However, I thought Barthes was harder to follow because he led with vague generalizations about photographs (example “what the photograph reproduces to infinity has happened only once”). I often had so-what questions about his points. Was he the first person to separate out Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum? These concepts seemed underdeveloped, and I was missing the real point in his proposed framework. I thought only the final chapters covered real examples and gave me a concrete idea of whatever point Barthes was trying to make. For example, I liked how Barthes related a good photograph to an “adventure.” And I agreed that photographs with essence often have the co-presnce of 2 elements (but I wasn’t sure if they were always limited to just 2).

I liked Gerz’s work. I think for the 1980s, Story Art is a novel medium. It reminds me of some of the postmodern nonlinear narrative structures that were popular around that time also (hypertext stories, Infinite Jest, Kurt Vonnegut, etc). However, I couldn’t stop thinking about Instagram poetry. It’s sparse and cliche and targeted to optimize likes. And I think it was the sparseness of the Story Art pages. But overall, Gerz’s work was helpful to review before Assignment 3.

Note: this was late (apologies)