Main points and observations (in yellow).
- It is nearly impossible to pass a day without seeing a photograph. Perhaps more true today than in 1982 especially in the era of smart phones with cameras. More photographs are taken every day on phones than were taken in the first 100 years of photography.
- Photographs are used to sell, inform, record and delight.
- Previously it had been unusual to view photography in the light of art. Really? Is this so today.
- Photography tends to be placed between painting and film, but is different to either.
- Generally paintings and films are viewed voluntarily but photographs are thrust upon us and seen involuntarily.
- After the 1960s semiotic studies (study of signs) radically reorientated the theory of photography.
- A photograph is rarely seen without a caption or title. Interesting as I have used captions for my work in Assignment 2.
- Photographs are texts inscribed in terms of photographic discourse, but they need to be read in conjunction with previous texts (Knowledge?) that are taken for granted.
- These prior texts serve a role in the actual text but do not appear in it. We use previously gained knowledge or information to help read an image but do it instantaneously and subconsciously.
- Treating the photography as an object/text, classic semiotics showed that the notion of the purely visual image is nothing but an Edenic fiction. No photograph is just a visual image there is always a hidden implicit text to be read.
- The signifying system of photography, like that of a classical painting, depicts a scene and also the gaze of the spectator - an object and a viewing subject.
- A photograph has a point of view and also a frame. Reference Stephen Shore.
- The frame organises the world into a coherence, which it actually lacks.
- Unlike puzzle photographs of the 'What is it?' type, with most photographs we see this decoding takes place instantaneously, unconsciously and naturally, but it DOES take place.
- Jacques Lacan: between its sixth and eighteenth month, the infant, which experiences its body as fragmented, uncentred, projects its potential unity, in the form of an ideal self, upon other bodies and upon its own reflection in a mirror; at this stage the child does not distinguish between itself and others, it is the other.(separation will come later through the knowledge of sexual difference, opening up the world of language, the symbolic order) The idea of a unified body necessary to the concept of self-identity has been formed, but only through a rejection of reality (difference).(The mirror phase as formative of the function of the I 1968) Jaques Lacan cropped up recently when discussing another student's work to which he has given the title 'Where nothing is real' referencing Lacan's work on The Real.
- There are four basic types of 'look' in a photograph: The look of the camera as it takes the photograph, the look of the viewer, the looks exchanged by people in the photograph and the look the subject may direct to the camera.
- Photographs are deployed so that we don't look at them too long.
- An average of 10 seconds was devoted by individuals when looking at any single painting in a gallery. Really!!! This is the average shot length in classic Hollywood cinema.
- When looking at a photograph the eye/I cannot move within it, it can only move across it to the points where it encounters the frame. Reference Stephen Shore The Nature of Photographs p. 84.
- Good composition is a device to keep the eye within the frame.
I felt that this was an interesting chapter that reinforced quite a bit of what is in Stephen Shore's book The Nature of Photographs. It also touches on work covered in the first part of the Contextual Studies part of the course. Although interesting, I found it very wordy and I had to go over it several times to pick out the meaning.
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