|
June 11, 2011
In 'Camera lucida: Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and the photographic image' in Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture vol. 6 no 2 (1991) Photogenic Papers Ron Burnett introduces a important distinction between photographs and images:
The former inevitably plays into questions of sight and object, questions of verification and truth - the latter is the result of an act of consciousness and therefore subject to a different, though related set of questions. The former must be seen to gain status, though as Barthes suggests, a photograph ' ... is always invisible: it is not it that we see' ... Images cannot claim the autonomy of photographs. Images can never be separated from vision and subjectivity. Images are part of a mental process, the result of an interaction between photographs and viewing subjects. Images are products of perception and thought, conscious and unconscious, looped in a spiral of relationships which are continuous - a continuum.
He says that often, the assumption is made that photographs have an existence outside the exchange between viewer and object. 'Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way a photograph does' . This assumption is a central one in all discussions about photography, the notion that there is a reality outside of the photograph for which the print becomes the representation.
Berger extends his argument with the assertion that a photograph 'fixes the appearance' of an event. In the moment and flow and flux of everyday life, the photograph preserves what the eye might otherwise not capture.
This is the point at which image and photograph must be seen as dramatically different. For although the photograph has an existence separate from the viewer it can never be removed from the process of interpretation. As soon as there is a spectator for the photograph an image results.Images are seen as carriers of meaning and images cannot exist outside of their context of use.
|
