Week 5 Sub- Weekly Readings

Sontag: Melancholy Objects

These two reading helped my understanding of photography and its relationships with art and thus design as well. Sontag’s discussion of the history of photography throughout the reading and how it was interpreted by artists and their movements was important in giving me an understanding of how movements, designers and politics have viewed photography in relation to art.

“Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.” Sontag suggests throughout the reading photography was seen as a simple census taker without any real purpose in art to most. However the modernist movement adopted the new technology and was keen to try and capture the ‘essence of life’. -This was the idea of capturing something real and not staged such as the Tong War in Chinatown New York City.

This movement was mainly concentrated in major urban centers such as London, New York and Paris as they allowed for a dissection of society, with people of every class in a concentrated, record-able space. An example of this is Sanders who created a book that documented people of many areas of society including models, circus people and those of each different class. However he still maintained the ideal of trying to capture the ‘typical’, with the gazes of the subjects not direct, revealing he didn’t ant them to know he was taking a picture.

This brings into the discussion the political ideas of the the reading with parties such as the Nazi’s having their own view on photography’s relationship with art. Sander’s work was impounded and destroyed as it was believed to be: “an impassive census-taker, the completeness of whose record would render all commentary, or even judgment, superfluous. This brings into the discussion the political ideas of the the reading with parties such as the Nazi’s having their own view on photography’s relationship with art.”

Barthes- ‘Camera Lucida’

Barthes discusses the classification and ideas of photography. Classification includes the empirical (Professionals I Amateurs), or rhetorical (Landscapes I Objects I Portraits I Nudes), or else aesthetic (Realism I Pictorialism). Like Sontag, Barthes explores the objectivity of photography, discussing how photography serves as documentation but can also be seen in a metaphorical sense: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.” pg 1.

Barthes conveys his frustration with books and literature on photography, with their focus being on either, the history, ideas of the picture in a too broad or too magnified lens.

The “singular adherence makes it difficult to focus on the photography”, pg 6, Barthes suggests than many overlook the idea of what the photograph actually is, rather than what it is saying with people unable to understand his pleasure and view of looking at that of Napoleon for example, through the eyes of someone who was actually there.