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tags: Photography
Thought
I never really consider myself a photographer or a professional or anything. I’m always just sharing what I see because I’d love for everyone I know to come along with me. This book talks about what is the photographer’s primary body part. A lot of people say the eye. The book was saying it was the finger (because the finger takes the photo). But for me it’s also the legs, because you see what you see because you have the will to go there.
I’m just thinking about that with relation to our anxiety or creative fears. But when you think of all the photos you’ve taken, they are always the result of your will to get up and go to a spot. It’s the result of pushing yourself to it. It exists because you walked/opened yourself up to that situation.
I also see a style of modern digital photography that is specifically about collecting data in your environment. You are not necessarily taking a picture in capturing a moment and just having that be done with (a film process, with finite shots is more like this - but still production could be performed.) What you do in a certain style is collect multiple shots, that have a high degree of information contained in them (full sensor information, ability to crop, dynamic range) and then when you return you begin the edit process. It is here where the actual photograph emerges in this style of practice.
If photography is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death. It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness to something that is no more.
The photographer bears witness to essentially their own subjectivity.
Punctum is,
The punctum points to those features of a photograph that seem to produce or convey a meaning without invoking any recognizable symbolic system. This kind of meaning is unique to the response of the individual viewer of the image.
Sometimes I would mention this in amazement, but since no one seemed to share it not even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.
The photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see.
The person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which there is in every photograph: the return of the dead.
For me the photographers organ is not his eye, but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the mechanical shifting of the plates. I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way…
Thought
Also the feet/legs. The photographer “zooms” with their feet. The photography only experiences a scene because they had the will to be there. This is true, and part of the act of noticing that is essential to photography. When you have a camera, you want to use it. It is true that this will towards experiencing things, if you allow it, will drive you toward these things you want. By following this will, you’ll observe more of it. For example, just this winter I’ve seen things I have never seen before. If I hadn’t my camera and my feet, and my will to suffer the cold - I’d not have seen it. I’d have been content in my room. Instead, I suffer and I see.
In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in “lifelike” photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.
The studium is the very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like. The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it mobilizes half desire, a demo-volition; it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments, the books, the clothes one finds “all right.”
The Almost: Love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status - which is why I hate dreams. I dream about her, but I do not dream her.
Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that thing has been there.
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Songtag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.