Photography Homework Week 3

Photography Homework Week 3:

We were tasked with going outside and taking photos of strangers. We got a portrait, 3/4 and full body shot. We then had to edit them and these were the 2 sets of shots, I think were the best

The last ones here are probably my favourite that I took.

I love the full body shot of this person

The reading we had to do for this week was Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. 

I did not like this book at all. It's not really a technical book about photography, it takes a philosophical view of photography. And I very much dislike philosophy. I feel it tries to look too deep into something that can be seen as simple. In essence, it tries too hard to find meaning when there possibly isn't one. Occam's Razor essentially. Example of this here: Ian McEwan has the stalker as just a madman whilst his son's English teacher assumes something completely different. Although maybe the interpretation of the English teacher may be okay, it's still not what the author intended so in a sense, wrong.

Coming back to the reading, I disagree with a lot of the points Roland Barthes mentions. One example is he states "The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed". Obviously the book was written in 1980 so Roland Barthes never had a chance to use Photoshop but with software now, any photo can be manipulated and transformed . So the point that in it nothing can be refused or transformed is technically wrong. I also dislike how he says, "it fills the sight by force". A photography can fill a sight by what the viewer sees. If the image is designed to be dark and show only few details, It may not fill a space by force but slowly emerge rather than coming straight at you which I what I think Barthes is trying to get at.

Quoting Barthes again, he says "All those young photographers who are at work in the world...do not know they are agents of Death". He goes onto say that when a photograph is taken, that thing in the photograph is dead or is going to die. This a very morbid idea to think about but the photograph could mean so much more than the people inside it. One of the things that I concluded was that within a photo, even though the person may have died, an idea will live on. Examples of this are:

The Tiananmen Square Tank Man

Monk on fire (Thích Quảng Đức)

Even though, it is more than likely that both these men are dead. The idea of standing up to authority and persecution are still alive. 

Another thing I disagree with Barthes on is; "I realize: it is love-as-treasure which is going to disappear forever; for once I am gone, no one will any longer be able to testify to this: nothing will remain but an indifferent nature". He's talking about how the picture of his mother and father, once it yellows and fades, and he himself dies. No one will care or know the love that they both had for each other. This is a huge contradiction. Everyone who has read this chapter, now knows that his mother and father were in love. And yet, 34 years after his death, still know. Photographs can be scanned and put on a computer and uploaded to a cloud service. Then it is in a sense, immortal. Until human existence comes to an end. 

Finally, Barthes mentions "X shows me the photograph of one of his friends whom he has talked about, when I have never seen; and yet I tell myself, "I'm sure Sylvain doesn't look like that." Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents". This seems like a silly idea. This is his own interpretation, I don't understand why he tries to pass this off as fact that everyone thinks when a friend shows them another friend that they think they look differently.

To conclude, I think that some of his ideas are okay. However I feel he's over complicating it whether he means to or not. I'm just not into the idea of analyzing a photograph to the point where the meaning behind it is lost or not thought of as, "this is a nice photograph because of the contrasting colours and I can see the photographer tried to capture the spirit of something" as an example. But to think, "all the people in this photograph are dead or going to die." It comes back to the fact that I think philosophers are different than the average person. Trying to find meaning in something when potentionally there isn't which leads to the question. 

Does it matter? Does it matter if a picture has no meaning?