Super happy to receive my assessment results today, the feed forward makes me feel all the hard work has been well worth the stress. When I finally got everything ready for assessment and uploaded the learning outcomes etc. to GDrive my blood pressure had gone through the roof and I ended up on a higher dose B/P tablet than I’m already on !
I got 72% for my Body of Work and very much to my surprise 70% for Contextual Studies .
As I expected I need to amend & shorten my essay, I’ve gone way over the word count. It’s now reduced to 4962 excluding quotes / headings & footer. Inclusive of quotes / headings & footer it is now 5759. Initially I never thought I would reach the required 5000 words but soon found how easy it is to write too much and waffle. The biggest problem I’ve found is narrowing the essay right down. I’ve chosen a subject that has so many different aspects I enjoy exploring has meant I allowed my essay to meander away from a central theme. For this reason Garry suggests changing the title, mine was too general, hopefully a different one will help me refine the essay as needed.
Thanks to fellow L3 student Andy for proof-reading my revised essay yet again, it’s much appreciated.
A few key points from feedback, my response / actions done or to do in red.
Summary of tutor comments:
I finally submitted assignment 5 to my tutor.
Huge thanks to fellow student Andy for proofreading it for me & locating typos.
I additionally printed it out to read carefully, I hate reading from a screen. I amended one paragraph as I realised I had misconstrued something. I also (to my horror) discovered a paragraph I’d repeated twice so altered that. I had a devil of a job with my Word programme… I swear it is possessed !
The title of my extended essay is Telling Tales: How (analogue) snapshots continue to communicate and what they disclose
I’m awaiting feedback, I really hope I haven’t got too many amendments or corrections to make at this stage but I’m sure there will be !
The Winter Garden Photograph, an unseen image, continues to inspire and intrigue. Odette England’s request to write or supply a photograph motivated by Barthes’ study of this renowned photograph was responded to by more than two hundred people. Prodger’s essay is included in Keeper of the hearth: picturing Roland Barthes’ unseen photograph a book containing a collection of short reflections and lots of photographs. I’m not going to write about the photographs, short responses or the other two essays in the book but can highly recommend it. It contains a wide selection of eclectic images (very inspirational) & I particularly like the layout and design.
Prodger writes eloquently as he imagines Barthes siting at his desk. Like Barthes, he uses words carefully that enable the reader to visualise the scene. Words, not image, are important, smell and sound is evoked. He contemplates Barthes holding and gazing at the Winter Garden Photograph. Prodger’s language alludes to the materiality and tactility of photographs, of the marks of time.
p.p 208
Prodger considers how language is used in Camera Lucida appraising Barthes’s use of Latin (studium and punctum).
“Such words behave like symbols in a mathematical formula, standing in for concepts otherwise difficult to express, but also creating the suspect impression that photographs are fundamentally different from other forms, since they require a distinct vocabulary” (Prodger, 2020:8)
Again referencing Barthes’s use of language Prodger, like Olin, wonders if the photograph even existed. “A Winter Garden, indeed ! The very poetry of the title should have aroused our suspicions from the start” (Prodger, 2020:9).
Prodger discusses how Barthes accredited the WGP as being the only photograph that encapsulates his mother’s psyche. Yet, as Prodger points out,
“the mere fact that he was able attach his own cherished feelings about his mother to the Winter Garden Photograph does not necessarily make the association true” (Prodger, 2020:9)
The WGP was not found by Barthes until after his mother’s death hence its context or what Henrietta Barthes was thinking or feeling that day is impossible for him to know. Prodger points out just how varied interpretations of family photographs can be. He suggests Barthes’ words “apportions agency to the viewer of the photograph, rather than the creator” (Prodger, 2020:210).
Prodger discusses how this trope has been the foundation for numerous photographic artworks but considers it
“a treacherous notion, since no photograph, no matter how banal or mechanical it may seem, is truly objective; and no memory, no matter how closely held, is strictly reliable” (Prodger, 2020:210)
Photographs are classified as being indexical, they show what it represent, hence are considered to be truthful representations. Barthes (2000:5) in the first few pages of Camera Lucida stresses photography’s truthfulness because of the form it takes “a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)”. Prodger disagrees with this, stating how frequently viewers misread images and make incorrect judgments. He gives the example of this 1934 photograph ‘proving’ the existence of the Loch Ness Monster that was later exposed as a fake. Yet despite being fraudulent some still believe in the monster’s reality. Prodger surmises the misrepresentation works “because of what it appeared to show, and also, importantly, what it did not” (Prodger, 2020:210).
Prodger considers the existence of the WGP to be irrelevant, speculating whether the five year old girl in the picture is someone else, not Barthes’s mother.
“The example of the Winter Garden Photograph reminds us that looking is not seeing, seeing is not perceiving, and perception by its very nature slippery and imprecise” (Prodger, 2020:210).
Veracity for Barthes is not a pre-requirement for a photograph to perform as an aide-mémoire. Hence, its exclusion is perhaps understandable. Memory is unreliable, illogical and circuitous.
“Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory…it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (Barthes, 2000:91)
Prodger (2020:210) suggests it is therefore important to keep in mind the difficulty of analysing photographs. “The more abstract the account, the more the referent (in Barthes’ terms) may drift from the thing it ostensibly represents“. For Barthes the WGP was a distressing image destining his mother to an unrecoverable past. Barthes (2000:92) describes photographs as “flat Death”, for him they are persistent aide memoire’s of temporality and mortality. However, as Prodger (2020:211) argues they need not be so, “Barthes himself gave us license to project a different set of expectations on them“. Concluding the essay he imagines a far happier Winter Garden Photograph, one in which “the young Henrietta is immortal“.
Bibliography / References
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage
England, O. et al. (eds.) (2020) Keeper of the hearth: picturing Roland Barthes’ unseen photograph. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Schilt Publishing & Gallery.
Prodger, P. (2020) “Memory Fails” in Keeper of the hearth: picturing Roland Barthes’ unseen photograph. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Schilt Publishing & Gallery p.p 205-211.
Jeffries discusses two family holiday snapshots, both taken in an era where men remained dressed in their suits and ties at the seaside.
Clothing worn in an image is a sign, it provides an “authentic period detail“. Dates written on photos, their format and age put images such as these into a time-space, they are visual clues. However, there are no written annotations on the back of the photographs discussed hence, neither Jeffies nor his mother were able to say for certain the date or location where they were taken. “In these images, I haunt a time and a place I find hard to imagine belonging to but to which I very certainly did”
He looks at a photograph of his grandad yet Jeffries’s memories are connected elsewhere, the man in the image is someone he barely recognises. In another photograph he stands with his grandmother “whose face I hardly remember“. He observes how snapshots “provide documentary evidence that we have forgotten people or things most dear to us“.
Jeffries discusses how his grandparents’s deaths led him to comprehend the transitory nature of life yet these snapshots continue to exist. “As we change they stay still, rebuking us, baffling us, touching us where it hurts most“. Over time their context has altered, what they were taken for so different to what they now mean.
He appraises Camera Lucida and Barthes’s distinction between the general interest in a photograph (the studium) and something within the image that transfixes, and evokes a personal response (the punctum). For Jeffries the punctum on looking at his own snapshots is not what he sees or is visible, he recalls instead the “smell of his mother’s hair” or of touching her clothing. He senses rather than sees his younger brother’s “vulnerability“.
On finding another photograph of his mother in a mini dress he considers if it is possible for both punctum and studium to be present in a solitary aspect “look at my mother’s hemline she never wore a dress that short before or since“. The photograph of Jeffries’s younger mother is at once both an accurate socially historical document and a poignant reminder of the loss of her youth, of the passing of time.
“I now know there exists another punctum—than the “detail”. This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that that has been”), its pure representation” (Barthes, 2000:96).
Locating another holiday snapshot of himself taking part in a cricket game on a beach alongside his brother and now dead father Jeffries describes it “all punctum“, the three of them “for ever frozen“, time has stopped. He finds no studium in this image realising “those days are gone for ever and eternally present. The colours are faded, but not enough to stop the photograph breaking my heart“. That is the paradox of photography, there is both an absence and presence. For Jeffries, when he looks at this image there is no general interest, but only the pain of a division caused by time and death, one that pierces him.
N.b Punctum / Studium
Bibliography / References
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage
Jeffries, S (2010) ‘The Power of the Holiday Photograph’ The Guardianhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/24/power-of-the-holiday-photo(Accessed 26/09/20)
Zuromskis, C. (2013) Snapshot Photography The Lives of Images. UK: The MIT Press
Check the Mail for Her Letter
Parrish’s project considers bereavement and how recollection fades over time. The title refers to a letter written by Parrish but one she never posted to her grandmother. She finds a link between this and a request by her grandma, suffering with dementia, to collect non-existent mail from a previous address.
The work consists of two sets of images. A set of ethereal contemporary photographs taken shortly prior and following her grandmother’s death and a second a set of manipulated archival family portraits that include photographs of her grandmother as a child. Opaque pigments and wax pencil are used to blur portions of the old photographs, they become visual metaphors for the splintered and degenerating memories of her grandma. They allude to the fallibility of memory and loss.
See project images HERE.
Exhibition HERE.
Her WEBSITE contains lots of visual inspiration and links to follow up.
Instagram HERE.
Bibliography / References
Harbage, C. (27/04/20) “Artist explores Grief, Memory and Loss Through Photographs” in The Picture Show Photo Stories from NPR [online] at :https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2020/04/27/830806858/artist-explores-grief-memory-and-loss-through-photographs?t=1600783874511
Parrish, A. Available at: http://www.amyparrish.com Accessed 22/09/20
Lesia Maruschak, b1961, Canada.
Maruschak’s absolutely wonderful work Maria and Transfiguration is in remembrance of and pays tribute to the millions of lives lost during the 1932-33 Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor) famine.
Of Ukrainian descent Maruschak’s comprehensive project was conceived by her own memories of family albums. Her mother-in-law survived Stalin’s purge of the Ukrainian populace, becoming an orphan in the process. Maruschak came across images where people had been severed out of certain photographs.
Rather than using a factual approach Maruschak’s multi faceted project constructs a different narrative, one that commemorates so many deaths caused by government strategy. She creates hand made limited edition books, in addition to more widely available commercial editions. Prints are rumpled up, opened up again and displayed. Old photographs are digitally altered, painted with tempera or waxed over. Poems and written material accompany imagery. Her creative processes, whilst aesthetically beautiful, address themes of memory, loss and genocide.
Maria
Not wanting to rely on objective sources Maruschak made an appeal on social media requesting photographs, one response resulted in receiving a photograph of a young girl named Maria who survived the famine. Maria , now an old lady aged 95 and living in Canada, recollected her sister’s and parent’s deaths. Rather than using a factual approach Maruschak constructs a different narrative, one that commemorates the lives of those whose deaths were caused by government strategy. A fabricated album and altered images hint at life prior to these events, the aura of pathos is palpable. Maruschak assembled an outfit to represent the young Maria’s clothing using her own personal possessions dating from the same era and incorporated this into the work. It can be seen in the album alongside an image of the young Maria.
The book and a further limited edition of 25 that includes archival material and a small square cyanotype can be viewed HERE.
An altered image of Maria can be viewed HERE.
An installation can be viewed HERE.
Transfiguration, a limited edition hand-made book by Maruschak pays homage to Maria. A Special Edition, of which there are only 7 copies, additionally includes an individual one-off art work of Maria, for example a cyanotype. Over half a dozen different papers are used, made by hand and pigments applied over the surface. These books can be handled, turned over and scrutinised, they are tangible links to the past. Maruschak states “I work to give materiality and document this modern-day atrocity in a tangible manner“.
Materiality manifests itself in two comprehensive and connected configurations.
More of her art work can be viewed on INSTAGRAM.
References / Bibliography
Maruschak, L .Available at: https://lesiamaruschak.com Accessed 21/09/20
Parrish, A. (s.d) “A Transdisciplinary Memorial to Millions Lost in 1932-33 Soviet-Ukraine” in Lens Culture [online] at:https://www.lensculture.com/articles/lesia-maruschak-a-transdisciplinary-memorial-to-millions-lost-in-1932-33-soviet-ukraine Accessed 21/09/20
Photo-eye Bookstore [online) at: https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZJ092&i=&i2=9789669767325 Accessed 21/09/20
Nickel (Nickel, 2000:233) appraises the Winter Garden Photograph and discuses Barthes passionate reaction to a solitary photo object. On finding it Barthes discovers what he considers the intrinsic nature of photography, its noeme. For Barthes the photograph is of less importance than his emotional response, “what is real for Barthes is feeling” . Nickel suggests because Barthes’s emotional response is a personal one he chose not to reproduce the pivotal photograph in Camera Lucinda, what is quintessential is not what is seen but what is connoted by his own reaction.
“I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture” (Barthes, 2000:73)
Compare with other theories of why the WGP was not reproduced:
Photography is a unique medium, the mourning Barthes recognises a relationship between photography and death. He understands images have multiple meanings.
“Barthes recognised how, as an object of interpretation, the snapshot is caught between private function and public meaning. The Winter Garden Photograph made itself available to his analysis in part because it was unmotivated, coming into existence for no other reason than to memorialize a moment in the lives of two ordinary children, and in part because Barthes’s carried personal information and feeling within him” (Nickel, 2000:234)
See Callahan notes 2012:16 re “iconographic relationship“…how Barthes is able to recognise his mother and articulate this.
Bibliography / References
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage
Callahan, S. (2012) Tracing Shadows -The “analogue” and the indexical sign-status of the photographic object. [MA thesis] Södertörn University (Stockholm)
Nickel, D. R. (2000) ‘Roland Barthes and the snapshot’ In: History of Photography 24 (3) pp.232–235. [online] At: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03087298.2000.10443413 (Accessed 06/05/2019).
Analogue photographs were not instantaneous, they were usually sent away to be developed. Nor were they easy for the amateur to replicate, hence they were considered unique objects. They are hard to throw away or destroy “unless it is someone one wishes harm, then one may burn the image in effigy” (Callahan, 2012:50).
Callahan (ibid, 20012:6) considers the “visual noise” of analogue images, their markings and ageing etc. Compare with how photographs are silenced over time.
+ SEE POSTS / LINKS BELOW
Barthes’s Camera Lucida is a subjective study of photography. The Winter Garden Photograph provides a link between past & present, Callahan suggests this is why Barthes considers “photography is not an art but magic” (ibid, 2012:14).
Barthes searches for a photograph of his mother, before finding one he knows it is categorically her. For Barthes what has been is at the core of photography’s power, time is linear, the photograph proof of a persons existence. However, this pivotal photograph is not re-produced and prior to finding the picture that penetrates him Barthes fails to identify his mother; “it was not she, and yet it was no one else” (Barthes, 2000:66). Barthes carefully scrutinises an old faded photograph of a five year old child before he finally summons her up.
The WGP is a non indexical sign ****important a photograph is supposed to be a trace.
+ SEE NOTES RE WGP links below:
Nickel, Roland Barthes and the Snapshot
Callahan (ibid, 2012:16) suggests indexicality “does not in itself have anything to do with the photograph looking like what it depicts“. How then do we recognise people, how was Barthes able to identify his mother, why and how do the affect us ? Old snapshots of aged relatives show the subject in their youth, how they once were, yet these same people have already grown old or are possibly dead. Callahan proposes it is because of “the iconographic relationship” between the subject and the person looking at the image.
The shadow of a body in an image is indexical, whilst it might be recognisable as a particular individual we cannot be totally confident it is really them. The child in the Winter Garden Photograph, Barthes’s mother, could not in certainty be her, Barthes himself declares the figure is “outside of “likeness“”. Yet, as he looks at the WGP he identifies her.
“The reality offered by the photograph is not that of truth-to-appearance but rather of truth-to-prescence, a matter of being, (of something’s irrefutable place in time) rather than resemblance” (Barthes, 2000:14).
Callahan (Callahan, 2012:17) considers how, when looking at our own photographs, we fail to disconnect the icon (the subject / person we know / knew) from the indexical. This subliminal merger generates…
“A fascination with, and emotional charge in the image: the photograph shows what someone (a mother, child, deceased relative) looked like at some point in time (icon) and we feel that the photograph is somehow directly connected to that person (index)”
N.b
A photograph is a sign and narrative techniques can contribute to the overall meaning, its meaning is not fixed and it can have multiple interpretations. Cultural and personal experiences will influence how an image is interpreted.The subject of a photo, unlike those in paintings, existed in time and space, they are not figments of the imagination.
“Family snapshots…are loaded with sentiment not just because of what they show but also because the camera is thought to contain a link or a trace to a particular time, a time that is inevitably gone by the time we look at the image” (Callahan, 2012: 20)
A gap exists in time between the past and present, a gap that evokes a sense of loss, of what has been.
Photographs are regarded as a mnemonic so what function can out of context and non indexical photographs perform ?
Consider artistic interventions / links below:
See M, Chandra research… emphases the nebulousness of semblance and presence. + email response .
” We can see these manipulations as highlighting the uniqueness of the photograph itself, a reminder that the photograph is always somewhat of a trick. The witness is unreliable indeed, the truth blatantly manipulated ad rewritten, figures are erased, footprints smudged and their indexical trace severed” (Callahan, 20012:34).
See C, Panebianco research…No Memory is Ever Alone + email response .
“Holding a photograph of a loved one is tantamount to connecting with that person” (Callahan, 2012:23)
Callahan (ibid, 2012: 45) discusses the frailty and materiality of old analogue photographs. Whilst photography stops time it is also linked with death,
“they both share bodies that are fragile and perishable and that show the passage of time. The photograph, the material negative, or the image, can thus act as analogy of the physical decay of our own bodies”
+ See Barthes notes HERE.
+ see notes on Poststructuralism & the language of photography.
Consider any writing on photographs, their haptic qualities, they are touched as well as looked at. They have blemishes, rips etc. these are marks from a previous time. Someone held, touched and wrote on them, the text and markings are indexical links to the past.
+ See my Frozen (in time) series SEE post HERE
Bibliography / References
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage
Callahan, S. (2012) Tracing Shadows -The “analogue” and the indexical sign-status of the photographic object. [MA thesis] Södertörn University (Stockholm)
Batchen considers the affect of old family (analogue) snapshots and photos.
Rationally tells us a photograph originates from its source, it becomes a trace or palimpsest and a direct link to the past. “To look at any given photograph is to enact a palimpsest, to put into motion an always tantalising reciprocation of the visible and the invisible” (Batchen, 2013:47).
Palimpsest…something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form…re-create / represent / not the same as original but a trace.
“Memory,… is selective, fuzzy in outline, intensively subjective, often incoherent, and invariably changes over time—a conveniently malleable form of fiction” (Batchen 2004:16)
Batchen (2004:94) proposes “photography does not enhance memory…something must be done to the photograph to pull it (and us) out of the past and into the present“. He suggests to do this not only must the photograph be modified but somehow the subject must also be reconstructed “from someone merely seen to someone really felt” to be capable of evoking an emotional response. Consider how Barthes does this with his description of the Winter Garden Photograph, how the narrative alone conjures up a sense of loss and sorrow.
“Barthes is referring to a kind of memory that pierces the complacency of everyday experience, crossing time to affect us right now, in the present. For Barthes, it seems, memory is not so much image as sensation. The challenge, then, is to make photography the visual equivalent of smell and taste, something you can feel as well as see” (Batchen, 2004:15)
Important…see Hirsch notes re WGP
Examine how altered and modified by artists / appraise the affect of their interventions.
Photographs are physical objects, consider the haptic qualities, can touch, hold and turn over.
“Framed photographs are objects, with physical presence, and this presence complicates what has long been understood as a defining attribute of photography—its indexical relationship to a world outside itself. Or at least, by turning the photograph into a sign of itself as well as of its referent, it prompts us to question the nature of that relationship” (Batchen 2004:40)
Snapshots are kept in memory boxes with other ephemera, albums are objects the owner curates.”Photographs taken on separate occasions are, for example, sometimes brought together to form a single coherent object” (Batchen, 2004:25). By viewing and classifying disparate images into a set a previously non-existent connection is formed.
“Handwritten inscriptions suggest the voice of the writer, adding sound to the senses of touch and sight already engaged” (Batchen, 2004:94).
Handwriting on photographs “used by those who wished to enhance the memorial power of the image” (Batchen, 2004:41).
“Usually, a signature on a photograph is meant to establish its authenticity” (Batchen, 2004:43) but can also be used to deceive or change context.
Batchen (2004:98) considers the craving for immortality. He suggests the process of preserving memories into commemorative objects “has little to to do with recalling the past; it is always about looking ahead toward that terrible, imagined, vacant future in which we ourselves will have been forgotten“.
Barthes… “The photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence—Whether or not the subject is already dead every photograph is this catastrophe” (Barthes, 2000:96)
See:
Bibliography / References
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage
Batchen, G (2013) ” The Great Unknown” in Burbridge, B & Davies, C (eds.) Photoworks annual: issue 20 : family politics. Brighton: Photoworks, p.p 42-47.
Batchen, G 2004, Forget Me Not : Photography and Remembrance, Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [19 July 2019].
Judith Bach 