Wynne Bullock: Revelations

“Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar of things, waiting to be perceived.” [1]

Wynne Bullock, Revelations Introduction, 2014,

University of Texas Press and the High Museum of Art

The quote above couldn’t be more appealing to me.  When I first read about Wynne Bullock in photographer Douglas Stockdale's blog I was immediately drawn to his work and wanted to find out more.  Wynne Bullock was a key figure in American photography during the period that I am beginning to understand is so important in American photographic history  – 1940’s to the 1970s.   His works Child in Forest and Let There Be Light both appeared in the Family of Man exhibition at MOMA in 1955, a landmark event which toured for 8 years and celebrated human existence and all its joy and horror following the war years. 

Bullock was born in 1902 and died in 1975.  After he finished school he pursued a concert-singing career which took him to France where he became interested in visual art.  He studied photography at the Los Angeles Art Centre School from 1938-1940, starting his photography career later than his contemporaries had done.  (I try to take comfort from this as I’m a only a few years older than Bullock was when he began; ok, maybe more than a few years but we live far longer nowadays!)  Bullock was part of the West Coast photography tradition working with and friends of Edward Weston and Ansel Adam’s amongst others.[2]

“His early work is deeply experimental.  Drawing direct inspiration from his exposure to Man Ray and Maholy Nagy, as well as that of his Art Centre teacher Edward Kaminski, Bullock began working to control tonal reversals in his photographs by subjecting them to pulses of light in the processing and printing stages, thereby creating evocative figure studies similar to the solarisations he had become acquainted with in Europe”[3] Like Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman, who also had work included in the Family of Man exhibition, Bullock was interested in experimenting with processes and in-camera effects – It struck me that I am repeatedly and unknowingly drawn to photographers who like to play with their equipment and processing techniques and who enjoy pushing the boundaries.

Wynne Bullock’s work is very much linked to the ideas and philosophies he was so interested in.  One of his main fascinations was with the work of Einstein and the theory of relativity as well as the difference between existence and reality.   His collection of books, all richly annotated, is testament to a deeply intellectual basis from which he practiced his art throughout his career.

Light itself was extremely important to Bullock, not just as a crucial element for photography but as a subject in itself.  Many of his images explored light and like the Dadaists he enjoyed relying on chance to realise some of his work; for instance Gravitation Acceleration was created by hanging “a small light pendulum over an unexposed sheet of film and allowing the forces of gravity and acceleration to construct a composition for him.  Given a push by the artist, the swinging light traced a precise design over the negative…”[4]  ‘Light to me is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe”. [5]

Bullock believed, like the artist Paul Klee, that art should “not reproduce the visible but ‘make visible’”[6] and his experimental abstract work, using solarisation, reticulation (subjecting the print to varying temperatures while processing in order to create cracks and bumps and faults  – which reminds me a bit of using Snapseed and other such apps to paste scratches and make holes in iPhone images), upside-down prints (I’ve done that!) and negative reversals are all used to recreate the reality he was photographing and see the world from a fresh place, much like Brecht did with his alienation affect. “Reality is as much about how you look as where”.[7]

I am extremely taken with Bullock’s attitude that “an individual must live passionately and sincerely”[8] which is the philosophy that informed his work and life.  I think there is much to learn from this position.

One of the things that I am beginning to find difficult to absorb and contend with as I study more and more photographers and other artists is the practice of photographing women without their clothes on, especially women laying down in particular poses, draped languidly and looked utterly unreal, as opposed to more genuine images of women such as Jodi Bieber’s Real Women [9] for instance. (I know it is unfair to compare, as these two photographers are working at very different times in history and are different types of photographer.  I was recently advised to look at Jodie Bieber and was so pleased to see this work that celebrates woman as they are; not alabaster fantasies or anorexic marketing tools.  The difference in her approach immediately struck me as I'd just been looking at Bullock's).  

Of course, there is a long tradition of ‘the nude’ in Western and other art throughout our histories.  And I am sure it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a different time but it seems less reasonable now in my eyes, although I know it continues.  Perhaps this is an example of some form of cultural myopia on my part?  A few of my images had recently been invited to a group on Flickr that I briefly looked at and understood to be for black & white images. It wasn’t until I looked more carefully that I realized the group was actually black and white erotica – I was amazed by some of the images, I have to say, and I never thought of myself as some sort of reactionary Mary White house type – quite the opposite actually.  It’s not the nudity I have a problem with.  It’s the attitude that it’s fine to ‘gaze upon’ women as if they were fresh meat, alabaster and perfect.  Surely we have all moved on … apparently not.  I thought perhaps there was as chance I was being a cultural philistine when looking at Bullocks naked females but a quick internet search confirmed that feminist academics have collectively written quite a lot on female nudity in western art, and it’s a relief to know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s an outdated habit that could arguably be consigned to history.  Nevertheless I do worry I am missing something important and profound by being so nonplussed with these images.

“’By looking at the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects,’ Bullock explained. ‘I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change”.[10]

I am more than a bit ambivalent about the images of nude women in Bullock’s work.  I can see that the work is important and that he is looking at realities that don’t immediately present themselves to us in our everyday lives.  But I can’t get over these examples of the male/female relationship that exist in our world, and one which allows such images to be considered more than fine.  Do we really have to undress women to stop seeing things in terms of objects?  Isn't that the opposite of what is happening anyway?  I don’t think every image that contains naked women is indicative of that attitude.  I think maybe Navigation without Numbers just about escapes it as the naked baby at least gives the woman something to relate to other that her nakedness - although she isn't relating to it at all; here there is something surreal and disturbing, why is the baby so far from it’s mother, why is there a vast black space between them, why do they both look down?  I would like to know more about this photograph.  I much prefer Lynne, Point Lobos or Child On Forest Road to any of the pictures of his daughter without her clothes, even though I know the Child in Forest is an important and well known work.  In the two aforementioned images the power of the natural world in relation to the small children is overwhelming and vast, and yet the children exist within it and will grow up and eventually die, and always be part of that world and its perpetual cycles too. And they didn't even have to be naked.

I really do like the abstract images and landscapes (sans naked women).  They are profoundly beautiful and imbued with the philosophies that Bullock was so interested in.  I think I will look at them a great deal.

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Quotations taken from the  introduction to Wynne Bullock, Revelations, copyright © 2014 University of Texas Press and The High Museum of Art
[1] Page 6

[2] Page 9

[3] Page 3

[4] Page 3

[5] Page 4

[6] Page 12

[7] Page 6

[8] page 12

[9] http://www.jodibieber.com/index.php?pageID=17&navLay=3

[10] Page 8

Colour thoughts

My assignment continues to evolve. I don't think this is a bad thing but it does slow me down which is fine if I'm working on my own projects but not ideal if I were trying to deliver a paid assignment with a deadline.  I'm struggling to know how to finish the project I have started, how to bring it to a satisfying close.  I have taken some risks with the photography and also with a decision I've made to include some images that I have not taken and I'm not sure if this is acceptable or not.  I am able to justify the inclusion of those images but who knows if it will be OK.  However, all of that is irrelevant if I cannot come up with a way to finish the project.

Each idea I try ends up being rubbish and I think what I need to do is settle on something and try to make it work.  Frustrating!!

Black & White - Filters

Take one image if using digital and convert using the presets in Photoshop to Black & White (mimicking the filters one would have used if photographing with film)

Create 5 monochrome versions digitally using the preset settings to emulate filters.  This is about understanding colour and tones and 'putting it to work in black & white'.  Having done this I am amazed by the differences in each image and think I will pay far more attention to the way I convert images in future, as well as think about what colours to use in the original as the red and green below have adjusted with extreme differences depending on which emulated filter was used.  There are many more possibilities available to me that I had previously imagined.

The image is a bit odd, I know.  I was playing around with potential props and this is what I came up with.  I used it because I quite like it but also because the colours worked well.  Would love to say it has some erudite and surreal, intellectual origin but I can't say it does.  But I do like to play and see what comes out of it.  When I look at this image, perhaps rather morbidly but actually I do find it amusing, I can't help thinking about corpses (my own corpse) in their coffins being outlandishly dressed up and if this were a corpse - she does indeed seem to have a very long green beard!  My favourite I think might be the blue emulated filter, although I am also fond of the red filter.  I can't work it out.

Original ISO 100 58mm f2.8 1/30sec

Straight conversion in Photoshop under Image and Adjustments

Blue

Green

Yellow

Red

Todd Hido

Todd Hido is an American photographer and artist who lives in San Francisco and who studied under Larry Sultan.  He was born in 1968 and teaches as well as practicing and exhibiting.  Some of his work has been used for book covers notably novels by Raymond Carver.

Many of his photographs are of urban and suburban spaces that give a sense of bleak loneliness, isolation, emptiness.  He also photographs interiors that convey similar feelings of personal alienation.  Nearly all his photographs of buildings are taken at night or early morning.  The lights are always on inside the houses and apartments he photographs (apart from one image at the date of the interview - link below) and that luminescence seems to convey a sense of who the humans inside are.  The light appears to have personality and emotion.

One of the most interesting things for me at this moment as I look at Part 3 of TAOP is the colour in Hido’s works. 

He uses analogue film and produces large highly detailed prints.  Light in every photograph plays a major role and the colour of that light conveys character and mood.

I have looked specifically at Todd Hido’s work in relation to my own colour assignment work.  The very distinct colour and the way Hido uses light is extremely interesting and evocative and crucially reminds me that there is more than one way to incorporate colour into an image.

In addition to Hido’s landscapes he also produces portraits of women in similar interiors to the ones he makes without people, images that I find upsetting.  I am particularly interested in these.  When I first came across them after someone on Flickr had suggested I look at Todd Hido’s work I felt enraged by the images - perhaps, according to a few, demonstrating a naivete in me, as far worse images of women exist in vast quantities, some hidden from everyday life and some blatantly on display as if such images were perfectly acceptable: page 3 models advertised as six foot posters on buses is one example - and in fact Todd Hido's images are far, far more honest and real than page 3 images which are frankly ridiculous, fantastical and offensive.  Todd Hido looks at the undercurrent of such images, I think.  Some of Hido's images I am referring to paint a seedy, lonely sense of powerlessness.  It infuriated me that women should be depicted this way in this context.  I must add that there are also portraits of women in his work who seem empowered and at ease with themselves.  However, I am discussing images where that is not the case.  I don't think I was enraged by Todd Hido himself who is merely exploring something that exists in the world and is worth looking at for sure - and I understand that possibly he is questioning a reality and asking his viewers to confront something difficult.  But I certainly felt furious by the fact that women in that light should exist at all, dis-empowered, diminished.  Maybe it is something to do with where I was at the time.  Maybe I'm just being judgmental and censorious.  I suspect, however, there is an extremely accurate reflection of how some men like to see women in the images and of how women sometimes can be.  That women should be there at all, or anyone else for that matter is enraging.  What I see in the images is a sense of abusive power, within the fantasy depicted, and deep, deep loneliness in every player within the image – the women, the implied presence of an Other (male) even if he may have left the scene, the photographer, and finally in the viewer.  There is a desperately lonely and vulnerable sense to many of these women, isolated, undressed, in bleak rooms.  I don’t see strength.  One of the things that comes to mind when I look at the images is that these women were once little girls with dreams and fantasies and hopes.  And that all of that has become warped, degraded and lost.  Lost hope.
Hido is extremely present in all his images.  But this is most apparent in the series where he has taken photographs from behind the windscreen of his car or through his car door window.  The texture of the rain falling on the window or of the dirt on the windscreen reminds us of his being there, photographing these scenes.  His mood is conveyed very clearly I think.  Thinking about the photographer as a crucial part of the whole scene is something I have not considered in depth before, which seems a little odd.

I have returned to these images after seeing them initially a few months ago because the themes that I mention here – the degradation of those little girl’s dreams and hope is something that I think I am exploring in the work I’m preparing for the colour assignment, although certainly from a woman's point of view and obviously with a woman's way of approaching it.  It’s difficult to be certain as I’m still working on it and I’m not entirely sure where it is going (or if I even like or value it!).  But returning to Hido’s work will no doubt have some impact.

Information gleaned from Wikipedia, ToddHido.com and an interview from Ahorn Magazine – (2008-11)

Tha National Gallery - Making Colour

Is it merely serendipitous good fortune that there is a major exhibition on Colour at the National Gallery as well as screenings of A History of Art in Three Colours just as I begin Part 3 of the Art of Photography – Colour?  Or is colour constantly explored in this way but I’ve never noticed before because I’ve not really been looking out for it.  It does seem a bit weird, to be honest - perhaps fortunate nevertheless.

I have found colour incredibly difficult to grapple with.  The theory in a way may as well be a maths problem (not my forte) for all the sense it makes to me at the moment.  Why should green and red be complimentary just because someone put them on the opposite sides of a circle?  They seem in my mind to clash dreadfully but of course I must be wrong and if I think about Christmas time, certainly here in Northern Europe, the base colours of the commercial Christmas palate seems to be red and green which is always extremely nostalgic, warming and inviting (although for some I believe the time itself rather than the colours are alienating, depressing and even horrific, Christmas being one of the worst times for suicide although of course that may just be apocryphal).  Nevertheless I’m at times utterly confused and had to reread the following several times, go back and look at the colour circle plus the definition of complimentary colours to make sure I’d not got it completely wrong;

‘I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green…( )...Everywhere there is a clash of the most disparate reds and greens…”[1]

Vincent Van Gough said about his painting The Night Café.  Having looked at the painting more closely, however, I begin to see that it is the yellow in the painting that is a contrasting colour to red but a similar colour to green if I’m understanding things correctly, which seems to give the painting a sense of unease rather than the red and green.  Lots of conflicting energy between the various colours.

I hoped that by visiting the Colour exhibition I would feel less confused and frankly at times bewildered by the whole colour aspect of things.  But although I enjoyed looking at some of the paintings I didn’t feel any the wiser when I came out.

It was however fascinating to learn at the exhibition and when I watched some of the History of Art in 3 Colours about just how important colour has been over the centuries.  (I most enjoyed learning about Yves Klein in the BBC 4 documentary and his obsession with blue, although that was far beyond the time that the exhibition was looking at.)

The art was European and spanned the years from the early Renaissance up to the Impressionists.  The two things I enjoyed seeing the most was Turners paint box which was a wonderful object to actually look at and Monet’s Lavercourt under Snow (1878 – 1871).  It seemed to me that you could feel the icy cold.  I read that the Impressionists frequently used ‘half shadows tinted with the complimentary (opposite) colour of the highlights’[2].  I tried this in Lightroom on a landscape I’d taken to see if I could give it an Impressionist feel – it didn’t work but I will have another go when I have photographed something suitable.

I do feel that although colour has been a challenge something of what I am learning is sinking in, if only that one can achieve specific effects by thinking of colours and how they work together or don't.  I give more advice about choosing colours to my clients - all gleaned and borrowed (very honesty I might add!) from the Internet and it has without a doubt had an impact on the potential for more satisfying commercial family orientated images - the sort that people will want to pay me to  take. 

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[1] Page 16 The National Gallery A Closer Look at Colour 2000, revised 2009

[2] Page 15 The National Gallery A Closer Look at Colour 2000, revised 2009

Resolving some issues about colour

I have been racking my brains trying to work out how to fulfil the Colour assignment.  We have been asked to provide 16 images that indicate complimentary colours, harmonious colours, contrasting colours and an accent.  In addition the subject matter must be varied - so the colours shouldn't all be based on light, or coloured objects.  There should be still life and 'found' scenes, the last of which is the most difficult to realise as you have less control - although a fellow student seemed to have done a brilliant job photographing all these elements at a day long event.

I was planning something linked to some thoughts I'd had a few weeks ago and up until last night I was trying to hold myself to that.  I wrote a little about it in my previous post.  I had 4 sets of images planned or in the case of 'found' hoped for.  But the problem was none of the sets was really related although I had tried to convince myself they were all loosely based on childhood or thoughts of childhood, even tenuously.  However, I was not entirely convinced.

Today I went to buy some props from the local party store and found myself beginning to get a clearer idea of where I might be heading with this and as a result have adjusted my plans, or allowed them to evolve at any rate.  I've dropped certain ideas altogether and linked up other ideas so there is more continuity between each set. 

One of the things I was told was not to make this project about COLOUR!!!  Well, I have to say at least one set of images is going to be a riot of colour.

There are four sets and in each colours will be either complimentary, harmonious, contrasting or with an accent:

1. Still Life - Preperation

2. Colours 1

3. Colours 2 incorporating light and a gel or a colour filter in Lightroom

4. The final set is the hardest to reconcile.  The word 'found' in my mind suggests heading out and searching for images that I come across in the street or shops or parks etc.  But if I do that then this final set of images is going to be totally unrelated to the first three and will stand out as something entirely separate and that would be a shame.  So I think I am going to wait for my kids to come and inspect what I've been doing, playing with props etc and photograph that.  Perhaps it's a bit of a cheat but the photos I take here will be entirely unplanned and spontaneous which I hope gets round it.  It will also be a fitting finish to the whole assignment which in the end for me is not really about colour at all but about how I go about producing something cohesive and authentic and creative.

I have had to do some little drawings.  These it turns out are a shining example of why I use a camera to try and express myself rather than draw or paint.  So I wouldn't dream of calling it a drawing board, rather a squiggle board.  It's been very useful as I can see that Set 2 is too dominated by red and it's various relationships whereas Set 3 is too dominated by blue and green.  So I must go back to the squiggle board and do some shifting round.  Once I've achieved that I will do a shot list for all sets apart from the final one which will just be about finding the four relationship requirements.

I'd better get on with it all as it's due very soon.

My problem with Colour...

... Is that I prefer black & white!  I think I do.  I love how it shapes shapes and lighting changes and removes the image from reality further.  The book I wrote about earlier this evening on Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel is filled with the most extraordinary black and white images. And I can't wait to move onto a section where I can start to try and figure out how to do some of the things I've seen there.  So, perhaps it's been good for me to look at colour like this as it's forcing me to open up how I work.

I've really struggled to find a way to do what is required for this assignment.  I am not sure what I've planned is right - I know there is no 'right' but I keep worrying I'm really missing something.  I think the only way to do it is with four sets of photos as we are asked to use different lighting, subjects, still life and found images, colour that is about light and colour that is about object based.  But the other work I have seen has very similar photographs which is why I'm a bit worried.

I have tried to stick to the original thoughts I had where childhood is the main theme.  I'm not sure I'm going to achieve the objectives but since the assignment is due in fairly soon I think I've got to go with what I've got planned.  I've a busy few days ahead.

                                                                          **************
I've been feeling really strange about photography lately.  Recently I was just so cross about some dumb mistakes I had made at a shoot with a family.  And I'd been feeling disappointed with much of the work I'd been doing for a while, so that by last weekend I was really questioning whether or not I was cut out for that sort of work, but if not that then what?  And I knew that just giving up and walking away from one type of photography was not the answer anyway.  I actually know much of what was informing this mood was totally non-photography related but it was affecting my work nevertheless. 

Mistakes, however, are really important sometimes because they can act as a powerful stimulant to getting things right next time.  For various reasons I feel less despondent now having resolved that I actually just needed to take a bit more control over what I was doing.  And some clutter seems to have shifted from my mind.

Colour has been quite important to be honest as I have realised how much of a difference it will make to the images I take when working with families.  So I've started being a lot more proactive with clients about what they wear and giving them clear instructions before I turn up about choosing a simple colour palette and mixing patterns with block colours.   So although some of my lighting has been a bit ropey I can without a doubt see that when client's follow those instructions it has contributed to a more cohesive image and set of images.  I just hadn't thought about this before embarking on this section of the course. So that's good!

Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman The First Retrospective

Ingo Taubhorn and Brigitte Woischnik

Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg

After I submitted assignment 2 I shared it on an OCA Facebook group and a very supportive fellow student, Jayne Kemp suggested I look at Alexey Brodovitch, as my images were blurry like the ones he produced in his collection Ballet(1).  I had not heard of him and Googled. 

As Brodovitch had such a huge influence on Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman, amongst many others (I’ll write about him too soon), their work came up in the search results as well. 

I was struck by how absolutely beautiful the photos are.  I was also very interested in the two photographers life stories.  I immediately wanted to order a book about them and within minutes of reading Jayne’s suggestion had spent a small fortune at Amazon. 

The book I ordered about Himmel & Bassman is something that I am going to treasure for years and years; I am so bowled over by the photographs and their history.

Both photographers but especially Lillian Bassman are probably known by history of photography experts but their names are not on a par with Diane Arbus, David Baily or Richard Avedon for example, all of who were working at the same time and were colleagues of the couple.  In fact Lillian Bassman and Diane Arbus have a lot of common threads in their histories.  Both came from Jewish immigrant backgrounds, both met and married husbands at a very young age defying their parents’ wishes, both worked in fashion and at Harper’s Bazaar with Brodovitch.  And both worked in partnerships with their husbands.  However, Arbus and Bassman’s lives do not remain similar, as they grow older.  Unlike Diane Arbus, Bassman and her husband did not get divorced and stayed together until they died, both in their 90s although Paul Himmel’s life ended shortly before Bassman’s.  Bassman continued to work in fashion for some time whereas Diane Arbus left fashion behind as much as she could concentrating instead on the people she found who seemed so separate and isolated from society (although she continued to accept jobs from fashion publications as well as topical magazines up until her suicide in 1971).  Bassman crucially had no tragic and violent self-imposed death cutting her career short and propelling her work as Arbus work did, and although her career in fashion lay dormant for a time she nevertheless took the most incredible photos at Paris Fashion week in her 80s.  While she wasn't working in fashion she continued to experiment with photography and explored a variety of subjects such as body builders and abstracts made from pavement cracks. The Birdlady for German Vogue 2000 taken when she was 80 is one of the most striking images I have ever seen.  It’s extraordinary and I think all Lillian Bassman’s long experience as a photographer, art director and a human being is evident in the photograph.

One of the things I enjoy so much about both photographers is their flair.  They both experimented with blur and motion as well light, exposure, aperture and pushing dark room techniques beyond the norm.  Paul Himmel, like Brodovitch, produced a book about ballet exploring the dancers’ movements by slowing down shutter speed and abstracting the images.  Himmel and Bassman produced work that was highly original and artistic and ultimately very beautiful. 

They were absolutely committed to experimenting with form and process.  Their solarized images, for instance, “look(s) half-negative, half-positive; black and white photographs that are embellished with colour, or colour photographs that look as though they are taken with false colours.  What’s more the contours in the image are outlined as if drawn by hand’[2]. 

I was amazed to read about how they used bleach to lighten and change images.  One of the things that struck me about this aspect of their work is that, although Photoshop is sometimes frowned upon for some reason, it really is a only a modern version, albeit one that is far more powerful, of what photographers have done for a long time manually in the dark room.  True, modern methods are quicker, offer far greater possibilities and are perhaps simpler to learn.  But I believe all photographers who worked before digital came along will have learned even the basics of pushing an image, or developing it in a way that produced unusual or unexpected results and have heard David Baily say as much in an interview he did on Monday 10 2014 with Mark Lawson for the BBC.  Bassman and Himmel, however, experimented with greater alacrity and creativity than most and the results are at times extraordinary.

Bassman, unusually, learnt her darkroom techniques before she learned how to use a camera.  Consequently she was extremely adept and both photographers spent hours getting processes right.  Despite their age and as digital manipulation developed they learnt about that too. 

Lillian Bassman, as I mentioned, worked for Brodovitch, the Art Director of Harpers Bazaar before becoming a photographer and eventually as Art Director of Junior Bazaar, the youth orientated sister magazine of the famous publication where so many of Bassman’s contemporaries also worked such as Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Man Ray and Robert Frank amongst others. 

Her experience as Art Director gives her images a very clear sense of design, which is one of the things that I find so appealing in them.  But her work was not confined to fashion and she ‘continually reinvented herself as an artist – particularly in the way she experimentally sounds out new worlds of imagery well beyond the fashion cosmos”[3]

Paul Himmel grew restless with fashion and eventually stopped working as a photographer although he continued to work personally.  At a time when many would be looking towards retirement he retrained and then worked for decades as psychotherapist.

They grew old together working the whole time and staying very much alive from what I have read and understood until the end.   They both died in their mid-90s and I think they are inspirational.

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[1] Ballet - 1945 Publisher: J. J. Augustin, New York

[2]Page 276

[3] Page 30

References from the book produced to accompany the retrospective at
Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Roland Barthes Camera Lucida

There is no doubt in my mind that I will need to read this book again, if I am even to begin to get to grips with it.  It’s no secret, I’m sure, this is an incredibly difficult book to take in and I certainly found it so.  However, I read it relatively slowly and tried to absorb each of the chapters as much as I could before moving on. 

I think that although the book is challenging, Roland Barthes does give the reader a bit of a roadmap during the first quarter of the book, detailing what he is aiming to explore – what exactly is a photograph and why are some photographs important either culturally at large or to individuals. This roadmap comes in the shape of specific language, which he uses to describe himself as accurately as possible.  As you work your way through the beginning of the book his discourse is difficult to penetrate but once you've absorbed the meaning of the following terms you are helped somewhat.

Studium – studied cultural details and elements in a photograph.  That which we recognize and rationalise .

Punctum – a word that describes the impact of a photographed scene that “shoots out of it like an arrow” or a “sting, speck, cut, little hole”. [1] This second word describes how a photograph works at a deeper level than the culture we see and which we recognize.  “Punctum… is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”[2]

He also describes the various contributors to the making of a photograph – the Operator (camera person), Spectator (viewer of the photograph) and then the Spectrum which is the subject, be it person, object, place or mood/atmosphere. 

It is at this point that Barthes introduces the subject of death and how everything that photographed is essentially dead once it’s been captured: “this word (spectacle) retains through it’s root, a ‘relation’ to spectacle and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”[3]

Being that this book is about facing death, the death of his mother and subsequently the notion of his own death, Barthes returns to this theme throughout the book. And I will too later in this blog.

I understand that in my above adumbrated version of Barthes’ work I have attempted to condense some very complex ideas, and that I probably really only have a fairly superficial understanding at this point but I hope I’m heading in the right direction.

There are several pivotal points for me in the book.  In particular when discussing the methods by which the Operator (photographers) create their work which aim to surprise the Spectator he lists various methods for doing so.  One of these methods is when photographers use “contortions of technique: superimpressions, anamorphoses[4], deliberate exploitation, of certain defects (blurring, deceptive perspectives, trick framing).”[5] 

I mention this as I am interested in blurring and motion.  The punctum which Barthes speaks of is often more readily accessible to me in some of this type of photography, however, he is fairly dismissive of it even though he concedes that there are some very accomplished photographers using these contortions. “…great photographers have played on these surprises, without convincing me, even if I understand their subversive bearing”. [6]  I have felt quite conflicted since reading this and agree with him one moment, believing I should focus on getting ‘real photography’ right rather than being distracted by my desire to blur with long shutter speeds on my camera or fiddle for hours with my iphone (using the Snapseed app for instance to distort and paint and create little scenes that remind me of something very dreamlike and sort of internally ancient and linked more to our unconscious inner worlds) and then swing the other way, wondering if I should just allow myself to really enjoy that side of photography – since I do so enjoy it.  I’m sure there is time for both if I think rationally about it but I have an inner nasty parent saying – ‘Stop that, silly stuff!’ 

(This conflict has led to me wonder if there is Photography Art as opposed to Art where photography is the medium.  I shall have to explain this in more detail elsewhere I think as this entry is really about Barthes’ book.)

Earlier I mentioned that Barthes discusses the relationship between death and photography throughout this book which is hardly surprising as he was prompted to write it when grieving for his late mother whom he had lived with all his life.  He felt her loss deeply and as one does when a loved one dies looked for some connection in photographs.  He found something of what he was looking for in a photograph of his mother as a child where he believes he saw her essence even though she was very young and not the adult he had always known. 

During the last section of the book Barthes describes powerfully how we react to photographs, and how we relate to the truth in every photograph, which is the ‘catastrophe’ of inevitable death.  “…the photograph tells me death in the future.  What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.  In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicots psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred.  Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”[7]

I clearly remember my horrific realisation when my first son was about a year old that he would, if he is lucky enough to have a full life, grow old and one day die.  And that it is very unlikely that I should be there with him, if all goes well with his life that is, so that he would be without me at that time.  It was a heartbreaking realization, and one we humans could not or should not dwell on as we go about our day to day.  I think Barthes is discussing how photographs have the potential and ability to punch this realization into our consciousness when we look at them in happy times.  And, of course, when we look at them in times of grief can bellow that reality back at us.  Death is unavoidable.

“It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death each one, however attached it seems to be to the excited world of the living, challenges us, one by one outside of any generality.”[8]

Barthes often refers to the photograph as a performance.  In fact he likens photography to theatre; “Photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableaux Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made up face beneath which we see the dead”[9], and this is a very encouraging for me.  I would like to think I can and should use photography to create my own little theatrical moments.   I am torn between photographing others and photographing myself as an ‘actor’ in a still tiny moment that is nevertheless a drama of sorts.  I must look at Cindy Sherman’s work more as she is the most obvious example I can think of in relation to this sort of work, although am also reminded of Jessa Fairbrother, whose work was recommended to me by my tutor.

Roland Barthes’ book was not an easy read but it was intensely interesting and valuable.  I am left once again with a sense of deep frustration that I haven’t read Sartre or Nietzsche, or a host of others not even mentioned in the Barthes book.  It is so annoying to be so ignorant.  I can put all these people on my very long list of books to read but who knows when I will get to them.  However, it does make me wonder if I would enjoy Understanding Visual Cultureperhaps later on if I continue with these studies, as I have been following someone’s blog who is doing that module.  It looks very interesting indeed!

All references aprt from no. 4 to Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, Vintage Books, Translated by Richard Howard, Published by Vintage 2000, Copyright Editions du Seuil 1980, Translation Copyright Farrarm Straus and Girouux 1981

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[1] Page 26

[2] Page 27

[3] Page 9

[4] a distorted projection or drawing which appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens: Google dictionary

[5] Page 33

[6] Page 33

[7] Page 96

[8] Page 97

[9] Page 32