Barthes and Gerz Response - Mikel
Barthes
I had a very hard time understanding anything of what Barthes was trying to say so I feel like I picked up very little from this reading. In the foreword I think I most latched onto his idea that “a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more.” The idea, to me, gives this weight to each photo that would constantly evoke sadness(?) for the lost moment. This is also why his insistence that the photos in chapter 9 were “banal” was weird, since his own philosophy tells me that no photo can be unoriginal.
Gerz
There are few examples where I can make any sort of connection between the images and the text. For the first, the Silent Majority tree, I think it’s easy to see that the words “The Silent Majority” act as the bark of the tree that holds up the vocal hatred. I understood the second one, with the list of objects, to be an interesting map where you are tasked with forming the image yourself. The paper-clip one was interesting because of the multiple frames, and how the words weren’t fixed to the “outermost” frame.
Ultimately, I felt as if each of these was a message meant for someone else that we are being allowed to look at. It was hard to find the connections I did, but they all give me the feeling that there is a more complete meaning in them, but only for someone else.