Camera Lucida

I found the Camera Lucida reading to be quite confusing. I also didn’t like how he focused primarily on humans as being the subject of photographs because they are not always the subject - often times there are nonliving things as the subject, such as buildings, and mountains, and there is an entire genre of landscape photography.

I did think his discussion on himself as a person changing when he knows that he is being photographed, as well as the photograph itself turning the subject into an object, and equating this transformation with death. I don’t think this comparison is quite right though, to me, the transformation is more similar to lifelessness, not quite like death. After all, photographs have to do with time, once the photo is taken, that moment has passed forever.

I found chapter 10 to be peculiar, where Barthes is explaining his rule of photographs that he found to be interesting. In essence, his “field” and the second object “disturbing” field, is what I interpreted to be a background and a subject. However, in my opinion, a successful photograph doesn’t necessarily have to have both. There are plenty of photographs that just consist of a subject, or just of a background that are interesting to look at. I did do some further research into this book and found that studium isn’t referring to a physical background, but rather to external interpretations (such as cultural, political, and social) whereas punctum is not just a subject, but the specific component of the photograph that makes you, the viewer to relate to the photograph on a personal level. However, even then, this explanation is unsatisfactory to me, because I argue that this definition is too specific and too dependent on the individual viewer. One example of this is that I didn’t really find any of Barthes’ examples of “interesting: photographs to be any good at all, and thus to me, they didn’t have any punctum.

Story Art - Gerz

I also found Gerz’s work to be quite confusing because when looking at the French Wall and Text-Foto Geschichten, there seems to be something missing, where I cannot pinpoint what he is trying to convey through the photos and the text. Sometimes it is the content itself that is confusing, sometimes it is that I cannot find a link between the text on the left and the images on the right. I have to bring in my own interpretations and personal and cultural background to attempt to fill in those blanks to make meaning. Words and text often work together in our daily lives, such as in advertisements, and on social media, and it is something that we are familiar with even as children since picture books often have images and text - in fact, we first rely on images to help us understand text, and then we are finally graduated and move onto novels without any pictures. In Gerz’s case, there is not an obvious tie between the text and the images. The text do not obviously caption the images. The images do not elaborate on the text. My favorite pairing is the look and lose. I love how the text is very coy, but then there is the juxtaposition of the heavy-handed “x” that gives the exact opposite mood of the text. It’s almost as if it is saying, “look, I’m super serious, don’t look or else you will lose, and you will pay in some manner.”