Semiotics Of Photography: B

B is for Barthes (Roland Barthes)

Image: R, Barthes, 1997, Roland Barthes By Roland Barthes, California: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc

Roland Barthes:  lecturing distressed him, panels and boards bored him.

How can you not admire or love him?

Guest Lecture

I conceded, ultimately.
Gave the lecture.
Told what Barthes had said
About photographic portraiture.

'The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.' (Barthes, R, 1982, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, London: Jonathan Cape, 13)

A bit like life, really. Only, life is mostly artless. . .

The class didn't last long.

Image from (ed) Jay, B (1994) Some Rollicking Bull: Light Verse, and Worse, on Victorian Photography, Germany: Nazraeli Press

After William Henry Fox Talbot's 'The Open Door' (1844)

Consider this
Something of a mystery;
I've just been invited
To teach photo-history.

The invite was really
Terribly formal.
Polite: a far cry
From the cursory normal.

But, it's just for a day,
And, they're happy to pay
To hear what it is
That I might have to say

On Roland Barthes.

Mais, oui. C'est vrai.

My own place of work
Would like to conjecture
If I'd care to give
A theory guest-lecture.

Of course, I declined.
It no longer seems right.
To remove
The dark-cloth;
Come into the light.

To move
From the dark-room
Into the sun. Forget
Camera Lucida
It's over. I'm done.

Heliotherapy failed;
The shadows are cast.
While in pursuit of
The punctum,
I got lost in the past.

Images from:  Sale, C (1959) The Specialist, London: Putnam & Co Ltd

Being Boring

'I'm trying to sort out my nomenclature; I'm determined to determine from what it is I suffer. I thought it was boredom, but it may be from torpor. I'm currently skimming the literature.

'I read Bertrand Russell in a fit of idleness; an excellent essay free from any kind of dullness. To appreciate it required that I lie in repose. (My preferred position when it comes to good prose.)

'I tackled Adam Phillips from the psychiatrist's chair, where the unconscious and subconscious were gradually laid bare. I learned a Ms Spacks links the novel to tedium; a pertinent discovery for one who loves the medium.

'Carol Mavor's Reading Boyishly is a damned good book. I flicked through the index and then took a look at the pages that referred to boredom and labor [sic]. The stuff, apparently, that made Proust and Ackerman tick.

'It was in a state of ennui that I yielded and gave in to the knowledge that my accidie was, in fact, a cardinal sin. I renounced the modern, espoused Medieval scholarship. Believe me, it's hard to beat self-flaggelation with a horse-whip.

'But, my lassitude's flagging; I'm beginning to get lazy. My aversion to working is driving me crazy. My apathy is starting to make me feel weary. If I don't engage soon, life might begin to get dreary.'

Waiting Room

'The setting represents the interior of a cafe; we have a rendezvous, I am waiting . . .'

Text: R. Barthes, 1990, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, New York, Penguin, 37
Photographs: Mike Berry

Watching Myself Waiting

Is Waiting A Waste of Time?

As a child I would wait, every other weekend, for the time when I was allowed to go home, hallucinating the moment when I could return to my mother. But, like Roland Barthes waiting for his lover, this proved 'futile, or immensely pathetic': damaging, traumatic.

'There is a scenography of waiting: I organise it, manipulate it, cut out a portion of time in which I shall mime the loss of the loved object and provoke all the effects of a minor mourning'. (R Barthes, 1990, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, London, Penguin, 37)

As an adult, this early-learned state of waiting became a space I would often inhabit: stasis, limbo. It became my chosen habit.

Marcel Proust describes habit as a 'heavy curtain' that 'conceals from us almost the whole of the universe'. Habit diminishes our senses and faculties, forcing them to lie dormant.

What I was too blind to recognise is that waiting constitutes this thing we call life. Life is the waiting game we play to distract ourselves from the reality of our mortality; that we're all going to die.

But, waiting - life - is also rich with experience. Its fabric is comprised of myriad incidents. External to the body or originating in the imagination, life is the product of one's daydreaming and reflection.

Waiting need not be synonymous with stagnation. As with boredom, it should not be sabotaged by banal, rehearsed distraction. Unobscured by that 'heavy curtain' of habit, waiting can provide the room in which one learns to see clearly; to understand what it means to be: authentically me.

Punctum

House Clearance, 9 Meadow Road, 1999

'This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call the punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is the accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).'

Roland Barthes, 1981, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p27

Studium

House Clearance, 9 Meadow Road, 1999

'To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer's intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract between creators and consumers'

Roland Barthes, 1981, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp27-8

Reasons To Go 0.6 (Part Six)

Gnomes and Noemes:

'We were talking horses for courses, last time, I seem to recall,' trying to breathe through her mouth as she spoke, while momentarily regretting her nicotine addiction.  Her laugh was becoming a death rattle.
He tossed his head and brayed. Animal, she thought, while assuming his neigh must be an affirmation, a confirmation, of her initial assertion. (The thing that distinguishes Man from Beast is language.  He was doing his best, all things considered.)
'So now it's time to talk noemes,' she continued.
'Gnomes?'
'Yes, noemes. Photography's noeme to be precise.  If we're to revalidate that old horse we need to understand photography's noeme.'
'Does photography have a gnome?' he asked.

'Well, yes, according to Barthes at least. Yes, of course,' she reiterated forcefully. 'Do you need me to elucidate?  Throw light on the situation. Have you not read the book?'
'Baths? I thought we were talking plastic figurines.  Miniature men with fishing rods and red hats?'
'Well, it's possible that some fly-fishers got fixated on Barthes and became photographers.  He uses the term 'metaphoric' after all, and what is art photography but a metaphor for something else?  And, why not a metaphor for fly-fishing; hours spent in absent-minded navel-gazing and hopeful anticipation only to return home with nothing but an old boot dredged from the mud and silt of a cloudy river bed?  But I'm not sure where the red hat comes in to it, if I'm brutally honest.'
'My giddy aunt,' he hissed, giddying up and baring his top lip to reveal his gums.  'What are you talking about now?  Come on, I want it straight from the horse's mouth. What have flies got to do with photography's gnomes? Or baths, for that matter?'
'Apart from that one stuck in amber?  I mean the fly, not the bath.  A lovely analogy for the photographic medium, isn't it just?  Now, let me think, now let me see.'