In approximately 500 words, summarise the authors main points, then conduct a brief critical reading of a photograph of your choosing, in the way that the text suggests.
We read a photograph not as an image but as a text which involves a series of problematic, ambiguous, and contradictory relationships between the reader and the image. The meaning of the photograph is created through a language of codes which is called ‘photographic discourse’. A photograph is part of a larger language of meaning. The photographer invites us to look deeper at the photograph rather than non-responsive. The photograph mirrors the world we live in, but mirrors it to show our way in the world, it does this through the photographic message of the culture of the world. There is not only mirroring occurring, but the photographer makes us aware of how and why the photograph has meaning. The photographer as a person is ‘actively’ taking the photograph, taking what they want to into the photograph. The photograph by Diane Arbus ‘Identical Twins’ demonstrates how we can look at a photograph and read into it. The fact that the title suggests that these twins are identical, we immediately look for the differences, furthermore as she has taken just one image with little knowledge of what is around these twins we cannot place these girls in a certain period of time, thus neutralising the photograph. Photographs themselves like pieces of writing have style, which we learn to recognise, this then demonstrates that the photographer self-consciously gives meaning to the photographs. Barthes stated that there are two relationships between the reader and the photograph, one is the studium which is a passive response to the photograph, whereas the punctum allows the reader to create a critical analysis of the photograph. Matthew Brady was a photographer in the American civil war, his photograph ‘General Robert Potter and Staff, Matthew Brady standing by Tree, 1865’ is a photograph which demonstrates two things, one a formal photograph of the army and secondly made himself the subject of the image, which in turn creates himself as a representative icon of the military world. This can then be seen as a conventional portrait. Another photographer, Lee Friedlander purposefully made his photographs difficult to read through breaking up the photographic surface and playing on the absence and presence. His work ‘Albuquerque’ demonstrates this well, yet not only is it broken up and there is an absence of parts in the photograph it too has no single focal point, thus making us look all about the image. Friedlander changed the history of photographs, through creating inferences through the objects in the photographs which in turn demonstrates how to read a photograph and its meaning.
Kate Moss 1990, http://www.corinneday.co.uk/exhibitions.php?action=zoom&id=190&exhibition_id=8
I have decided to look at this photograph by Corrine Day. It portrays a bandy legged, youthful Kate Moss on a beach. The photograph has captured her as a semi developed woman, this captures the shy awkwardness of a teenager. It has also captured her at her most vulnerable. The use of colour in the photograph or lack of it is nostalgic. This demonstrates the mirroring of a photograph and the way that we are in this world,(G.Clarke 1997) 'in other words, series of visual languages or codes which are themselves the reflection of a wider, underlying process of signification within the culture', the vulnerability of a teenage girl, the fact that the landscape, whether created on purpose demonstrates the isolated feelings which teenage girls go through. I feel that as stated by G. Clarke 'the image is much a reflection of the 'I' of the photographer as it is of the 'eye' of the camera', thus demonstrating as the photographer is a woman, she herself is capturing in Moss what she herself has felt at some point in her life.
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