Week 2

So I just finished reading Camera Lucida and I have a lot of thoughts that I was trying to keep track of while I read. I suppose first I kept thinking about how in class this week Debra asked if we could all agree that photographs produce knowledge. It’s obnoxious to disagree about the first thing you are asked to agree on but I kept thinking about the word knowledge. When Barthes wrote about the studium I kept thinking that it wasn’t so much like knowledge he was describing but it was more like information. Photographs defiantly produce information, and these given elements described as studium, were more or less the undisputable information the photograph was generating. Information, in my mind, is more neutral than knowledge. It is free of belief or desire or agenda. Then I kept thinking at was this information that was producing knowledge, the things Barthes knew to be true beyond doubt, the things that were true to him. These were what he called the punctum, as in he knew his mother existed in that winter garden photograph. Yet the photograph did not generate that knowledge, Barthes did. Perhaps my amendment to out initial giving would be that photographs produce information, and we through our interpretations turn that information into knowledge. I think in this way knowledge making as an active process, it happens, and us reading it make it happen. It is also less objective, and on a personal level completely uncontestable. Who, for example, could argue against the punctum of the winter garden photograph? This intensely personal and subjective aspect of punctum has come to distress me a bit. I can’t really describe it except to use the example of finding a song you really really love and playing it for a friend. You want so badly for your friend to love the song the same way you do, to feel punctured in the same way, and when they don’t its more than disappointing its isolating, its lonely. Maybe I am reading to much into this but Barthes seems very lonely towards the end of Camera Lucida, I picture him alone, going through old photographs. I wonder if he ever showed anyone the winter garden photograph or just kept it to himself.

Ranciere pick up on many of these themes, specificly citing studium and punctum in the introduction to The Future of The Image. I found this chapter difficult but interesting, especially when he comments on the duel poetic of photography being the tension between what the photograph can tell us, the information it gives, and what it keeps silent. I kind of interpreted this idea of silence as being what unknowns a photograph can evoke. For example in a photograph of a man sitting with his chin on his fist we know he is sitting and thinking, but it keeps very secret what he is thinking. I am also still fairly confused about the differences between Ostensive Images and Metamorphic Images. So I tried to make a ven diagram: