Week 3

Barthes’ Third meaning is interesting to me, especially after heaving read Camera Lucida, because you can begin to see how he is starting to lay the groundwork for his Studium/Punctum dialectic. What struck me most about the texts these weeks in comparison to Camera Lucida was how structured his arguments are and how he seems to be attempting to devise a system for distilling meaning from photographs. His approach verges on scientific although, already in the third meaning you can see how confounded he becomes by that which is obtuse, and difficult for him to describe. (I also has had some questions about his second meaning and the work of symbolism in images in relation to the intention of the image maker and the interpretation of an audience and how widely these things may differ. In other words, whos meanings are being addressed here? Do symbols the author intends but the reader does not understand revert back to first meaning? To studium?) By the time Barthes writes Camera Lucida he seems to abandon this rigors approach to image interpretation and comes up with an almost completely intuitive strategy for finding meaning in images. He leaves the structure he is trying to create here and goes completely based on feelings, in a very fluid way that allows him to double back on his ideas. I kept wondering of there was something to learn here, especially since we read Camera Lucida first, about how to think about the meaning of images. Of course as a practical matter charting the levels of meaning of a photograph is absurd and so much of what is most important about photographs to Barthes seems to resist being put into language, it is experiential. If even Barthes is left to the mercy of his emotions, and longings, and lusts when interpreting photographs what chance to I have to do any better?