Final Paper: Students by Their Desks
1.
A
Description of my Photographic Blog and Process
My photographic concept is to take photographs of
students in Aarhus. This is an aim towards describing the diversity of the town’s
many students from a variety of educational institutions, though it is
impossible to represent everybody with only 14 photographs. I visually document
what students and their desks look like, and thereby give insight to Danish
culture as well as the time we live in.
In the beginning of this project I used the concrete
sense of the word ‘desks’, but as I through the research became conscious of
the fact that far from all students study at home by their desks, I included
the word’s connotations of being a workspace. By using the concrete sense of ‘desk’,
I can depict student life besides from the studies due to the desk’s function
as a symbol of the person being a student. The photograph Salome for example shows a young woman by a desk filled with both
books and makeup, whereby I use the desk to indicate that she is a student, who
is getting ready for a party. I took the photograph with my old Olympus U780
and used Picasa’s cross processing filter in order to give it the snapshot look
and thereby underline the situation as being a private event among friends.
Now, however, I realize I should not have edited it as much as I did, because my
aim is to show the world as it really is.
This project started out as a personal challenge. I
will soon begin my third semester of anthropology, but I feel as if I lack the
experience of talking with strangers, and I believe this is one of the anthropologist’s
most important skills. I therefore challenged myself to approach strangers,
listen to their stories, and take my time to shoot a nice photograph. I wanted
to show the diversity among people in Aarhus. This project which I called
“People in Aarhus” became too wide, and it would have been hard to create coherence
between the photographs, I therefore narrowed it down to “Students by Their
Desks”. This is the reason why the first image on the blog falls out of
category, although it figuratively shows my desk throughout this course. The
first image took me several hours to take. My adrenalin was going each time I
saw a potential subject or even thought about it. I was nervous to be rejected
if I asked for permission to take a photograph, but when I finally gathered my
courage the strangers happily let me shoot. After I had narrowed down my theme,
I asked my friends to help me, I put a note on the outer door of my apartment,
I posted adds on my Facebook groups and status update as well as on a group for
Parkkollegierne. I furthermore approached strangers in Statsbiblioteket and in
my gym, whereby I kept the original challenge. I never got rejected when asking
to take somebody’s photograph; on the contrary I discovered that students in
Aarhus are really helpful. A great deal of my subjects told me they would be
glad to help me, since they know how hard it can be to find volunteers for a
school project. This told me a lot about students’ mentality.
Nanna is the second photograph I took after changing the
title. Although Nanna and I had arranged the photo-shoot beforehand, I was
still nervous about the process of taking the photograph, because I do not have
any knowledge of photographic techniques. I decided to ask Nanna to write down
on a piece of paper what she felt about being photographed. Besides from seeing
the subject’s point of view, this allowed me to take a naturel picture where
she did not pose. Nanna felt somewhat revealed because the photograph shows how
she is studying by her kitchen table instead of her desk, which would have been
better for her health. Combining Nanna’s feeling of revelation with my
nervousness I can conclude photography is an intimate process from both sides
of the lens. Throughout this research, I have gained courage to approach
strangers, which truly makes me satisfied. After the third day I decided to
switch my Olympus to a Nikon D3000, and I borrowed a book on digital
photography from the library. This was a good choice, because it made me want
to play more with the camera, and it made me feel more professional, which
added to my self-respect when taking the portraits. I have found out it makes
my subjects relax if I talk to them or ask them to read or write something
while I take their photographs, which makes the image more authentic. By
showing my photographs in class they have elicited information about students’
study habits, because my classmates have told me which parts of their student
life I were missing. I have followed up on the information by asking my
subjects if they do something similar or if they have other odd habits. This
method, which I at the time was unaware of, is called photo elicitation, and it is a method I will remember in my future
anthropological researches (Harper 2002).
It is remarkable how my subjects all have laptops,
though not always shown on the photographs. This fact allows for the workspace
to be portable, which partly explains my need to not only shoot actual desks in
order to depict contemporary habits of studying. By including the students in
my photographs, and a description of them in the caption, themes become visible
such as the large number of students with a non-Danish background which reveals
today’s globalization. I visually emphasize the historic value of my
photographic body on my blog by placing the photographs on a document roll
background.
2.
Roland
Barthes writes,
“The photograph is literary 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 Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
(Barthes 2000: 80)
2.1: Please describe this passage in the context of the rest of Camera
Lucida.
Roland Barthes searches throughout Camera Lucia for
the ontology of photography. He finds the elements studium and punctum to be
objective characteristics of interesting photographs, though they are subjectively
defined. Studium is to have taste for
the image, and a desire to reflect upon it. Punctum
is a small detail which catches the eye and calls for imagination. Whereas the studium is always coded, the punctum is not (Barthes 2000: 25-59). In
the second half of the book he searches subjectively for the ideal photograph
of his recently deceased mother as a way to cope with his loss.
Part of Barthes’s studium
is the camera’s ability to document “that has been”; this he considers the
photograph’s essence, its noeme. However,
although all photographs have this noeme,
they are not equally interesting (Ibid:
76-77). Barthes is amazed by the thought that he as the spectator, the observer, sees the same thing as the operator, the photographer, did, even
though time has passed since the photograph was taken. The same light rays from
the spectrum, meaning the subject
photographed (Ibid: 9), which then created the image, are still visible in the
photograph from which they now reach his eyes. This explains his claims that without
the referent there would be no photograph, and that a photograph cannot lie; it
reveals the truth in opposition to for instance a painting (Ibid). The quote
from page 80 is Barthes’s way of attributing the invention of photography to
chemists instead of painters, who are often granted the honor (Ibid: 80). The
quote also links the chemical process to the spectator’s subjective mind: “Which ultimately touch me” can refer
both to the light rays that radiates from the spectrum and at last reaches his
eyes, whereby the rays connects him to the spectrum, but the words can also refer
to the emotional effect the connecting rays cause in him. The star metaphor,
which Barthes uses in the quote, leads the mind towards his deceased mother,
who religiously speaking has gone to heaven and in a spiritual way become a
star. There is furthermore a connection between the eternity of a star and a
photograph’s ability to outlive its spectrum.
This metaphoric language refers to Barthes’s view of the photograph as a
reminder of death, moreover it refers to the second punctum, which is the excitement arousing from having a
frozen moment in the photograph, but knowing what will happen after it has been
taken (Ibid: 93-97).
It is remarkable that Barthes chooses the Winter Garden Photograph, in which
his mother is only five years old, to be the ideal image of her. In the quote
he expresses how time does not matter because the spectrum still touches him; this becomes clear to the reader in the
context of the Winter Garden Photograph.
Even though he was not alive when the photograph was taken it is still a
physical prof of his mother’s existence, the only one in which he recognizes
her air, her true soul, which is
timeless. Air is the person
underneath the masks that often appear when the person is posing to the camera.
These masks can be a result of a formal format, the photographer’s direction,
or the subject’s wish to be presented in a certain way (Ibid: 109-110). In this
photograph his mother is neither showing nor hiding; she expresses in her pose
the same attitude and the same characteristics as she has maintained throughout
her life (Ibid: 69). The photograph exists only to Barthes because of the
subjective value he ascribes to it (Ibid: 73). The photograph is a reminder of
his mother’s character and his own upcoming death, but it is also a way to feel
connected to her through rays of light.
2.2
How does the presence of Adobe Photoshop and social media sites (such as Facebook)
challenge and/or support the above text?
Barthes’s description of the light rays, which are
released from the referent and ultimately touches the spectator, is still valid
as a description of how photography works in the context of new media. New
media is for instance Facebook, where photographs are uploaded in an absurd
quantity, and often almost instantly after they have been taken. However in
contrary to Barthes, who is touched more or less by the nature of every
photograph, the contemporary spectator is not touched as deeply; instead he
rapidly goes on to view the next photograph. The continuously increasing visual
bombardment from all sides of society has created a visual restlessness. Spectators
are most likely not emotionally touched by the magical transmission of the
frozen reality onto the screen from which they accept the rays of light that
constitute the image they see. They are too used to seeing images, to even
think about this process. The common use of editing programs such as Adobe
Photoshop furthermore challenges the first sentence in the quote. We cannot be
sure to see the truth, the literal emanation of the referent, in a photograph.
However, we can see fragments of the original referent’s rays mixed with the
rays from another spectrum or a digital filter, whereby the photograph only
becomes a partial truth and therefore more similar to a painting, which Barthes
so strongly rejects by emphasizing the chemical process. The transmission of the
rays is somewhat still insignificant, since we can find both studium and punctum in an old photograph, but in connection to the photographic
news value in new media, a fast transmission is absolutely of significance. A
photograph has the ability to speak for itself; therefore a photograph uploaded
to a social media site or an online news agency is the fastest way to spread a
story.
2.3 Using the
photographs from Charlotte Cotton’s book on contemporary photography, please
use one specific photograph to support Barthes’ passage and one specific
photograph to challenge or expand on his notion of how a photograph works.
I will use Elinor Carucci’s photograph My Mother and I from 2000 to support
Barthes’s passage (Cotton 2009:159). With the background knowledge of this
being a non-staged photograph, the chemical process of the camera reveals a
true moment in Carucci’s life in accordance with
Barthes notion of a photograph being a physical proof of a frozen moment of
truth (Carucci 2010 and Barthes 2000: 80). This authenticity touches me both physically
through the light rays which reach my eyes, but also emotionally, because
Carucci lets me into her life. To me the studium
of this photograph is the bond between mother and daughter. Carucci has created
a visual grace which attracts me to the image. This, I believe, is due to the calmness
of colors and the triangular composition. The grace is furthermore found in their
relaxed and natural pose. They do not seem to be aware of the camera at all; as
in Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph
they seem to neither hide nor reveal anything (Barthes 2000: 69). Their
nakedness does not strike me as odd to a greater extend; on the contrary it
leads the mind towards universality and the nature of love between mother and
child. The mother’s hand, which is caressing the daughter’s hair, contributes
to the theme by adding the motherly instinct to protect and comfort her child,
which I imagine is a big part of what Barthes calls her air, though I do not know her (Ibid: 109-110). These details all
contribute in the visual creation of the emotional bond between the two women.
Barthes writes the studium is coded with cultural knowledge. In this photograph
Carucci uses codes of how the ideal mother-daughter relationship should be
(Ibid: 22). I feel love and affection when I see this image. It is the ideal
moment in a mother-daughter relationship, which makes me want to create a
similar moment with my own mother. To me Carucci’s hand is the punctum of the photograph. It emphasizes
the fact that the photograph is a frozen action, and provokes me to think about
what the two women are talking about. Is Carucci crying about a painful
experience and therefore being comforted by her mother, or have they just
laughed? It pricks me not to know, and therefore I agree with Barthes that the punctum is what makes me want to keep
looking at or thinking about the photograph in search for answers (Ibid: 43-45).
This photograph moreover supports Barthes in his notion of the duration of time
being insignificant (Ibid: 80). Even though it was taken in 2000 it is still
both relevant and emotionally moving; this photograph seems timeless. Moreover,
it is and always will be a physical proof of a specific moment in Carucci’s
life.
On the other hand I will use Line by Vibeke Tandberg to challenge Barthes’s passage. This photograph
depicts an ordinary young woman in a domestic environment. As the spectator I
get the impression of seeing a moment of reality, but I am not. Tandberg
manipulates reality by inserting her own facial features into those of her
friend Line in order to underline the photographer’s power of her subject
(Cotton 2009: 217). Barthes notion of the photographic process needs to be
expanded in this case, because the photograph is not literary an emanation of the referent as he claims in the quote (Barthes
2000: 80). The light rays still originates from the photographer’s subject, but
the rays do not go directly into the camera at first; instead they enter the
photographer and become a mental image, from which the photographer can develop
ideas of how she wants the final photograph to look. The photographer then
arranges her subject according to her idea. Now the light rays emanates from
the controlled subject, reaches the camera, and are transferred into a computer
where the image is blended with another image, whereby the final result will
radiate light rays from different sources. I thereby argue the photograph is
not a literal emanation of the referent. Furthermore, this process shows how
photograph can no longer be a proof of anything. What Barthes considers as the
essence or noeme of photography named
“that has been”, is no longer inherent in all photography (Ibid: 76-77). Left
is the studium, the punctum and air. Whereas the studium
and the punctum are referring to a
subjective interest in the image, Line’s air
objectively vanishes the moment Tandberg interferes with her pose and not the
least when she edits her face. What is left of Line is only a mask; she has
become an object of art.
Through the two contemporary photographs from Cotton’s
book, I conclude that Barthes’s notion on photography still is partly valid,
but it needs to be expanded because what he considered being the essence of
photography can no longer be found in every photograph.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera
Lucida. (Richard Howard, Trans.) London: Vintage Books. (Original work
published 1980).
Carucci, Elinor. 2010. “A Retrospective,” found at http://www.visuramagazine.com/elinor-carucci-a-retrospective,¨
accessed on August 16, 2012.
Cotton, Charlotte. 2009. The
photograph as contemporary art. (3rd ed.). London: Thames & Hudson world of art.
Harper, Douglas. 2002. “Talking about pictures: a case for photo
elicitation,” Visual Studies, Vol.
17, No 1. Routledge.
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