We are having PDF issues... The readings can be found in front of my office door.
Extracts from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes (found in your book as well)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
On the Invention of Photographic Meaning, 1975 by Allan Sekula
If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
Thoughts on the Allan Sekula reading: I really liked how Sekula was talking about all the different ways/viewpoints that you can interpret a meaning of a photograph. I feel like the cultural view is something that has been drilled into the back of our heads since birth because of our generation and how we've grown up with images all around us. Questions that came up in my mind while reading this was, "If photography is no longer 'art' then why is 'Camera Works' still praised as 'art?' If only for the craftsmanship of it then what's the real difference between 'Camera Works' images and those in a newspaper since printing images in newspapers is a form of craftsmanship(at the time)?"
ReplyDeleteThoughts on the Walter Benjamin reading: “In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.” - Paul Valéry I felt like this part of his excerpt is keeping with the same ideas as the Sekula reading. The physical component of art used to be/still is in some degree a huge influence on it's authenticity and worth. When Benjamin talks about reproducibility I'm constantly remind of how many times I've seen the Mona Lisa or portraits of famous presidents. At the same time, I'm also reminded of their worth and their age. When Benjamin talks about how a reproduction could be perfect, it lacks presence in time and space. I've been lucky enough to actually see the Mona Lisa in person but even then when standing in front of this historic piece of work I still felt out of place because of it's age. I feel like that component of time plays a huge role in our sense of giving a piece of art meaning.
Thoughts on the Roland Barthes reading: I red this one last and I'm glad I did. Starting with Sekula's discourse of the meaning of a photograph and ending with Barthes personal story of his viewpoint of photographs of his mother, for me, tied everything together. Every person feels like they look or perceive an image differently because of culture or knowledge but I feel like within that difference we all look at photographs/photography in the same way. We need to assign meaning whether it be worthless or not. When we assign a meaning we've then taught ourselves what Barthes calls “infra-knowledge.”
5 Photographs: (Photoset) My Week With Michelle Williams- Vogue by Annie Leibovitz, October 2011
I chose this set because I recently saw this via Tumblr. I think that this photoset express' similar ideas from the readings. Williams/Leibovitz channels Monroe which makes me think of time and place and how I've been seeing more and more photographs merging these and updating them while paying homage to past icons. I feel like Leibovitz creates her images with beautiful craftsmanship. (This can be extremely debatable but I'm not going there right now.) I'm also assigning personal meaning to these photographs because recently on break I found a photo album filled with photos of my grandmother who at the time of the photographs was similarly dressed with a similar hairstyle. My grandmother was an admirer of Monroe and she fell into the craze of styling herself like Monroe during her younger years.
Sekula: I was a little confused with Sekula at first when he talks about the photographic discourse and how it puts limits on us and we basically need to place ourselves away from it, but besides that I agree with the idea that in a photograph there is a hidden message that need to be discovered. A photo is basically unfinished until someone with some outside context reads it. This outside context is given to us by the experiences we have in life and is mainly influenced by our culture or society. We learn to read photographs that he states is a "photographic Literacy"
ReplyDeleteBenjamin: One thing I did not, or could not really grasp with Benjamin but I can sort of see is the whole aspect of the aura. How I see it is when you make a copy of a copy of a copy, etc… eventually the original image is gone and what are you left with? I liked this idea of how by having a mechanical reproduction you are able to bring art to the masses which I believe is a great thing. People can now see paintings from around the world at their home. The work goes to them instead of them going to it. But there is a downside to it that I found very interesting in which the more the work is reproduced the original meaning of the artwork itself becomes lost. Sort of like Van Gogh's Scream paining; the meaning of the painting is changed now by seeing it everywhere and sort of represents the idea of art in a museum rather than what the original intention was.
Barthes: He remands me of the intimacy we hold to life through images. The weight we put on these abject that resemble someone we know and love. It is interesting to think that what the photograph shows is what was once there, or at least a very accurate representation of what was. The concepts and thought that we put onto images are very powerful. I don't agree with what he says about how the photographer does nothing and it is up to the person being photographed to make the picture.
Aaron Siskind: I think introducing the work of Siskind would be interesting and add to the topics of what the readings have talked about. Siskind was an abstract expressionist photographer that actually inspired painters. His work involved creating abstract images from architecture and nature and creating new meaning and ideas that were completely separate from the original thing he photographed.
http://www.darjanpanic.com/content/mop/aaron-siskind/images/aaron-siskind_018.jpg
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The work of in the of magical reproduction by walter Benjamin he talks about that there are many manifestations in reproduction of body of works. that there is physical evidence of ownership in reproduction. his views are very interesting and different thought the reading it aslo was hard to understand what he was trying to tell us .
ReplyDeleteon the invention of photographic meaning - Allan Sekula throughout the reading i was very confused by the way he writes could really grasp what the point was but he talkes about exchange of quality that is commutation which i thought was an interested concept. he explains how text is a suggestion which i thought was unique way of thinking about it
Benjamin's work was very interesting to read, although hard at times to understand. I get where he is coming from with the comparison of photographs to painting, and the whole idea of reproduction "lacking in one element: its
ReplyDeletepresence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." this is interesting to me because this is what we do in photography every day. Most photographers wouldn't see any of their work if it wasn't for printers and computer screens, which i see as reproductions of the work as well.
Barthes was, for me, much easier to understand than Benjamin's work. I liked his views on having to give photography, and photographs meaning. Reading about his process of photographic "knowledge" actually changed my view on how to look and produce images, and makes me see that there should be a thought process behind everything and that a reaction, any reaction, to a photograph is there, you just need to look for it.
The way Sekula wrote was slightly confusing to me, but i believe i understand what he is saying about the hidden meaning in photographs, and i couldnt help but compare it to Barthes writings. I find it very interesting how, using the ideas in both Sekula and Benjamin's writings, that viewers could look at the same image and perceive it differently than others.
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