Barthes

This reading was interesting because I was expecting a structural analysis of photography. It felt more like a philosophical reading where the author went through his own personal view and experience with photography. It was interesting to see his thought process as he tried to understand what parts of photography he liked/disliked and why, but I also felt that this was a very egotistical approach (which was done purposefully). As a result, I don’t know if I really resonated with many of the statements made in the reading.

There were serveral points of contention I had with statements the author made. One of the thoughts I had was about the author’s claim that photograpy is unclassifiable. One of the reasons they give is that some of the apparent classification approaches (pro/amateur, landscape/object/portrait/nudes, etc) could be applied to other forms of art representation. However, I feel like many of the classification systems that are used for other art forms do still apply to photography. I don’t really understand why sharing a classification system was problematic/invalid in a sense.

I did like the point the author made about how many of the photographs we see are filtered through society/culture. They were very discontent with this, but societal filters also are a measure of some kind or relevance and it can be used as a mark of a good photograph if it is able to convey meaning to such a large span of people. I also think its very rare that we like all forms of art from any given artist, this is not something unique to photography or the author. Another interesting point the author made was about posing and how we change our bodies when we are aware that we are being photographed. The conept that posing is likened to “making another body of oneself”. It reveals that posing is of itself another art form/skill that we learn as we seek some form of aesthetic representation of ourselves.

Gerz

I thought the Gerz piece was interesting as it played with combinations of text and photographs in ways I haven’t considered before. I think I was fairly confused on a lot of what the artist was trying to convey after looking at the photographs and found myself turning to the text as a form of explanation. However, even then, there were several points where I wasn’t sure what the connection between the images and text were. I’m still not quite sure whether the purpose of this was to play on the missing spaces/imagery (like the frame becoming the picture). Even though I don’t think I extracted the full meaning I enjoyed the intertwining of text and image and think the format is very cool.