Tuesday, October 16, 2007

More heaviness to ponder... in relation to "the real"...
Not the heavy type? Skip and go down to some refreshing photos below.

"What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. As soon as the click of the shutter has taken place, what was photographed no longer exists; subject is transformed....." - Roland Barthes.

"Memory is normally embedded in an ongoing experience of a person who is remembering.... if the photograph isn't 'tricked' in one way or another, it is authentic like a trace of an event: the problem is that an event, when it is isolated from all the other events that come before it and which go after it, is in another sense not very authentic because it has been seized from that ongoing experience which is true authenticity. Photographs are both authentic and not authentic; whether the authentic side of photographs can be used authentically or not depends upon how you use them." - John Berger

5 comments:

rchrd said...

Barthes is concerned with the subject of the photograph. To him, it no longer exists after the shutter is clicked.

To the photographer, the subject does exist, in the photograph. He no longer is concerned with the subject.

Berger invokes memory, and asks about authenticity.

To the photographer, the photo is authentic enough. Maybe not to a court of law. But the photographer remembers taking the photo and being there.

The viewer might not have the context in which to judge authenticity, or to be concerned with existence. But the he/she does have their own memory, against which the image invokes either discord or concord.

The photographic image, like painting, is merely chemicals and light. The viewer's memory is what brings it back to life.

And that's really not so heavy after all.

Richard Friedman

Amy Elkins said...

Not so heavy for you, nor for I and perhaps not for a number of others...
but I guess some are definitely not the theory type..

Some perhaps just want to make photographs that they are satisfied with. I fall in between.. on certain days the weight of the moment and the photograph are heavy on my mind and on other days the last thing I want to do when I make a photograph is think too hard.

rchrd said...

That's the difference between artists and art critics.

I don't really understand art criticism. Sometimes it seems that we must be looking at different things, because what they're saying makes no sense with what I'm seeing.

I've got something to say about just this problem (of mine) on my blog .

Eric said...

I don't know if this is of interest but I recently saw this Werner Herzog interview where he tries to explain his views of authenticity in film. Films not photo but I think it fits:
Herzog Interview

I really wanted to say I've been checking your blog alot and I'm a big fan of it.

Aaron Joel Santos said...

I'm going back and forth on Barthes but I like the Berger quote a lot.