worth a thousand words

(from grayskymorning.tumblr.com)

"Good art makes you forget where you parked your car."
-Haley Mellin

Another post inspired by my photography class. It's so nice (and refreshing!) to finally have a class that makes me think, that inspires me to delve deeper within myself, that's informative and fun at the same time.

We had to read Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida for today. A summary, stream of consciousness style:

within photography there exists a duality, a "co-presence of two discontinuous elements," which he calls the studium and the punctum...the studium is the range of meanings that are universal to anyone and everyone...the punctum is "a cast of the dice," the private meaning; the detail that attracts and holds the spectator's gaze...the photo-self never coincides with the actual-self, creating a life of its own, and the subject photographed suffers from inauthenticity...the photograph does not necessarily so what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been...every photograph is a certificate of presence: the photograph has no future.

I have a lot of (still sketchy, only slightly explored, mostly questioning) thoughts on the subject, and I'm not really sure how to cohesively and coherently share them. Perhaps continue with this stream of consciousness motif (I take my notes in this format too...it's a little disorganized, because when I go back through my notebooks I don't necessarily understand my own thought process. But when looked at from a distance it makes me look so smart!)

Here goes:

There is a sort of nostalgia that surrounds every photograph taken, even the ones that were taken just last week, or yesterday. Photography is the act of capturing an instant of reality, a moment that will never happen again. Barthes refers to this as the "death" of a moment, but to me that's a little macabre. Rather than despairing that the moment will never occur again, I'd prefer to have the photograph as a reminder, as a memory aid. So what that the moment will never again occur? It could have been the most beautiful moment of your life. But life is full of beautiful moments. And it's better to have a photograph, I think, because the moment lives on through it.

(That wasn't exactly stream of consciousness.)

a negative has as much integrity as a painting-- the same rays of sunlight that touched the negative touched the subject...the punctum should affect: it is more about an energy, a feeling. how does this photograph make you feel? bring your own personal visual history to each new image you encounter...the only thing universal about photograhy is that it's subjective...what defines a culture is what it chooses to reproduce and archive.

It used to be that photographs showed the ultimate truth. The same rays of sunlight that touched the negative touched the subject. It was authentic, and accessible. The instant of reality captured on film could not be faked. Nowadays, with digital technology, we have no way of knowing if what we are seeing is what actually happened, or what something/someone actually looks like. I feel that this has skewed with our perceptions of reality (whatever that is, anyway), and I think it has rendered a lot of skepticism surrounding art, or advertising. Now that we can manipulate an image that used to tell it like it is (was), is there still an honest punctum when we look at a photograph? I know a punctum is inherently honest, but isn't it a little tainted if the image isn't real? What's the point of photography, then, if not to capture a slice of time? Does it just become another artistic medium?

I don't know where I'm going with this.