Semester One Annotations
‘The photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look, ‘See’, ‘Here it is’, it points a finger at certain vis-a-vis and cannot escape this pure deictic language’
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Pg 5
Some view photography as nothing but surface level. Something to capture, point out the obvious and show others an experience. This has been crafted and refined over the years with the way technology has developed and the language we use to describe the ‘every day’ image
‘Get back to photography - What you are seeing here and what makes you suffer belongs to the category ‘Amateur Photographers’ dealt with by a team of sociologists. Nothing but the trace of social protocol of integration.’
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Pg 7
To those who truly enjoy the craft of photography and not just for the ‘every day viewer’ we are restricted by the labels that categories us creating walls between what is acceptable for us to, or not to do. We should abandon those labels to free ourselves from this pain and create without boundaries .
‘To become an object made one suffer as much as a surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prothesis invisable to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in it’s passsage to immobility'
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Pg 13
Photography used to be a drawn out process as we didn’t have device that where invented to create an instant image yet. As such those being photographed would have to go through the uncomfortable experience of standing completely still waiting for the moment to take place. As the world progressed and with that the technology, everything became quicker and yet a layer of uncomfortably still remained for the model.
‘After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached. In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it’
- Susan Sontag, On Photography
‘As we are constantly surrounded by media and taking everything in, there is a point that we reach the depth that an image can have on a person. As we have become accustom to being overstimulated by these images we constantly need move leaving little time for development and a deeper thought process behind each image.
‘Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental polution’
- Susan Sontag, On Photography
Due to the overstimulation in todays society, both online and physically we have become accustom to constantly filling ourself with content form the outside world to the point where if we have a break, we can’t sit still with ourselves.