Written response to sections 6-12

I'm currently taking a class at UCSD called Visual Poetry. We are reading Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. We read a few sections each week and submit a written response. Here is my written response to sections 6-12

In section 6, Barthes wants to have a reason for liking a photograph beyond the purely personal and immediate. He wants a system for understanding or classifying a multitude of photographs, but he fears that this is impossible. I think this may have more to do with his being a philosopher, a systemizer, than anything to do with the nature of photography. He wants to understand not just why he likes a photograph, but why one anyone would find a photograph good or bad. This doesn't acknowledge, or undervalues, the subjectivity of taste.

The distinction between interest and animation concerns Barthes in Section 7 as he explores the nature of attraction to a photograph. I think this is a useful, but not profound, distinction: Interest is just the automatic recognition (that's a person), whereas animation is a more personal, meaningful reaction (there is my first girl-friend, there is a herd of giraffe migrating).
Section 8 had some meat for me. For each photograph to have an existence, it must be distinctive, which makes it difficult to classify it compared to other photographs. Barthes classifies this as sentimental and specific. This aspect of photography strikes me rather as primitive, existing before or beneath language or concept. This reaction to a photograph is the ultimate in subjectivity: the fact that a photograph is of something that actually happened tricks you into classifying it almost on the level of something that happened to you, that you saw with your own eyes. It is easy to believe, as compared to a painting or drawing, that the artists intent did not influence the image.

I wasn't able to make much of Section 9, to be honest.

Barthes, in Section 10, is still trying to codify and name his attraction to particular photographs. He equates studium with the broad ideas that you bring to a photograph. Many different photographs can share the same studium. This is the closest that Barthes comes, so far at least, to the system of photography that he desires. But this is not in the particular photograph, and is something that many people could bring to the photograph. I find this to be an interesting but somewhat obvious observation. The punctum is the more interesting concept for me, dealing with the particular facts exhibited in the photograph. The punctum makes this photograph different from that one, also making it an artifact of a particular time and place. Someone talking on an iPhone can only have taken within the last few years, for example.

The most interesting part of Section 11 is when Barthes writes: “ The Photograph is dangerous) by endowing is with functions, which are, for the Photographer, so many alibis.” He seems to be saying that the photographer has to justify taking a photograph.

In Section 12, Barthes returns to the idea that a photograph has to be of something that has its own existence. He believes this makes it less fluid, as if the details are fixed in place. A negative comparison is made to a text, where a single detail (one word) can change how it is interpreted. I would have to disagree. As you read a photograph, your reaction can change as you build it up in your mind, noticing details along the way. Take Weegee's The Critic as an example. When first see the “fashionable” society women, it is one image. When you notice the bag-lady, the critic of the title, it changes to highlight the stark contrast between their circumstances. If you then learn that the woman was placed there by Weegee's assistant, it changes again.

Another example comes from Cindy Sherman. The first reaction is “Girl in trouble”, or simply “Girl”. As you look closer, you wonder: Why is she wet? Is she on a dock ? Where is she looking ? Just how young is she ?