Barthes

While this reading felt like a good introduction to photography as an art form, I disliked the author’s writing on photography. I first started questioning the author’s writing when he mentioned how he liked Photography in opposition to Cinema but also failed to distinguish between them. I think his urge to fully define photography in classification and style worked against rather than for him.

The author mentions this concept of how the photograph is a single, unique, and honest depiction of some moment in time (“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once”, “the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of “Look,” “See,” “Here it is””, photographs exactly represent what they depict”). While I see what he’s saying, I don’t think I fully agree with him. For example, photographers often try again and again to capture what they release. I think it’s very rare to really capture the essence of a unique phenomenon, even if the actual moment itself is “unique”. He also mentions how when sharing a photograph, the first thing people react with is sharing a photograph in a similar topic of themselves. I think there’s a difference between sharing photography as an art, rather than sharing photography as a casual picture of a moment. In one there is a focus on the artistry, whereas in the other there is a focus on the moment.

I did enjoy the emphasis that the author put on modeling for photography, including the model as a core aspect of photographs (the “target”). I think this line of thinking is a good one, as well as the description of the human urge to “pose”. The last topic I strongly disagreed with the author about was about how he didn’t think there was style in photography because there was no photographer that he universally enjoyed the works of. I don’t think this can be the case in any work of art, regardless of photographs, painting, music, etc.

Gerz

For Gerz’s art, I enjoyed the concept but had difficulty actually analyzing the pieces. I don’t think I understand the context around what his artwork is showing well enough. However, from just an artistic lens, I really enjoyed the framing of the text in his poetry. I liked the variation the author used between shorter texts (“look & lose”) to the longer poems. I think the shorter texts were not as artistically interesting to me (the writing looked sloppy and off center in comparison to the longer works), but I did enjoy the use of black and white against the natural texture and color of the paper, and the use of photographs in the later works.