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Roland Barthes on photography MESSAGECODE signifer (representation)signified (meaning) denotationconnotation photographcaption obvious or informationalsymbolic traumaticideological “natural” noncodecultural code recordstransforms studiumpunctum signifiance
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Barthes: Camera Lucida Public / Private responses to the photograph Barthes and the “return” to phenomenology To define the eidos of photography eidos = appearance, idea, constitutive nature, species What common basis unites all our otherwise different “encounters” with photography? The noeme or “essence” of photography What I “intentionalize” in photography is “that-has- been.” The “intentionality of imagination,” or a purely personal relation to the photograph
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Barthes: the eidos of photography The essential nature of our subjective experience of photography is defined by an irreducible singularity. To experience time as a singular and unrepeatable event. “Every photograph is a certification of presence” “I want a history of looking” (12), or the irreducibility of the emotional experience of looking at photographs. the Spectrum: the experience of being- photographed the Spectator: the desire and emotion aroused by the act of looking at specific photographs
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To experience time as a singular and non- repeatable event.
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“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”
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“... The Photograph... represents the very subtle moment when... I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14).
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The studium and the punctum The studium refers to the range of photographic meanings available and obvious to everyone. The studium is: Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance. Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal comprehensible way.
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The studium is: Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance. Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal comprehensible way.
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The studium and the punctum The punctum (Latin) = trauma (Greek) inspires an intensely private meaning “escapes” language--it is not easily communicated through linguistic resources is “historical,” as an experience of the irrefutable indexicality of the photograph The punctum as a “partial object” or detail that attracts and holds my gaze. The photograph is a temporal hallucination (115). the photographic and the filmic images
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The punctum as a “partial object” or detail that attracts and holds my gaze
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The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination....” (115).
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