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11. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (with Helen Miller)
291 Plays1 year ago
What happens when a French philosopher writes about photography while grieving for his mother? Did you think that was the setup to a Freudian joke? What’s wrong with you? You people make us sick.
The wonderful Helen Miller joins us to discuss Roland Barthes’ seminal photography text Camera Lucida.
Also mentioned: John Berger, Giorgio Agamben, Aristotle, Georges Perec, Geoffrey Batchen, La Jetée, Walter Benjamin, Arnold Toynbee.
Intro music: Candy Jail by Silver Jews
Outro music: Broken Front Teeth by Scotland Yard Gospel Choir
Contact us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Podcast Setup and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
we're still moving into this house. So there's actually not a lot on the walls and it can be kind of loud. So I came into this spare room that just still has all these boxes of books, which, you know, I don't even know what to do with them. Well, if there's anything more thematically appropriate for this podcast than using piles of books to dampen your sound, I don't know what it is. Can we take like an eight to 10 minute break here? Yes.
00:00:29
Speaker
Okay. Thank you. I'm just going to pause it so all the cameras will stay up and everything and I'll be back in eight to 10 minutes. Thank you. A different version of you will be back. No, the corpse of my younger self will be back. So prepare yourselves for that. Wow. That's amazing. You can exfoliate that.
Guest Introduction: Helen Miller
00:00:57
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Candy Jail. Thank you for being here. I'm Brendan. I'm here with Robert, and we are thrilled this week to have a special guest, Helen Miller, from the photography podcast, A Minimal Event. Helen, do you want to take a minute and plug your podcast?
00:01:16
Speaker
Sure. Minimal events started as a reading group with three friends. We are all color photographers. We met when we were printing photographs maybe a dozen years ago at a local photo center called the Photo Center Northwest in Seattle. And we were often that crew
00:01:43
Speaker
that was when everybody was out Friday night having their good times we were in the dark room printing photographs and talking to each other about our photographs and talking about our projects. That led eventually to a reading group where we got together and discussed
00:02:04
Speaker
informally some of the critical theory that informed contemporary photography just as a way to bring ourselves up to speed because a lot of times when photography is taught, the emphasis is on older or what I think of as a more romantic notion of photography. So we were really interested in exploring contemporary areas that was more in line with how we like to work.
00:02:35
Speaker
And actually, after several years, we decided that it might be fun to try to record it because sometimes these discussions about these texts are about photographs or shows that we had seen in person ended up being quite lively.
00:02:51
Speaker
wished that there were more resources like this available for us just when we were looking in the world for others who were talking about photography. So in a sense, we were looking for peers. So we thought we would do what people do when they're looking for peers is we would send a satellite out into space and see if anybody answered. So we've been doing it now for a few years.
00:03:18
Speaker
And in fact, we're going to record our next episode this week on Wednesday.
Origins of 'A Minimal Event' Podcast
00:03:29
Speaker
I don't exactly recall. I think it has something to do with the fact that one of our members, Chris Letcher, is really laser focused on the minimalist movement in art. And so I think he may have either began to curate readings that were heavily bent in that direction. Not all of us are fans of the minimalist movement.
00:03:55
Speaker
So, you know, it was just came out of a joke. At some point we started calling ourselves the Minimals because we were only reading material that had to do with minimalist art, you know, like Donald Judd, another Donald Judd. But then when we started the podcast, one of us I think was like, we'll call it a minimal event. And that is in fact what we, anytime we do something together, like recently we went down to San Francisco to
00:04:24
Speaker
see that Bergen-Hilla Becker retrospective at SF MoMA. That was a minimal event. We all piled in a plane together and went down. Well, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to have this conversation with us. Super fun. Thank you for inviting me.
Introducing 'Camera Lucida' by Roland Barthes
00:04:44
Speaker
Since Helen is a photographer and something of an expert on the theory around photography, we thought we'd read or reread, in some cases, one of the most seminal works of photographic criticism.
00:04:59
Speaker
the thin but intimidating volume, Camera Lucida, by the French philosopher Roland Barthes. Robert, do you just want to give us sort of the back of the jacket explanation of what this book is, and then we can talk in a little bit more detail about what's actually in the pages? Yes. So this is literally from the back of the jacket, but it is short, so hopefully painless.
00:05:26
Speaker
Cameron Lucida, Roland Barth's personal wide-ranging and contemplative volume, and the last book he published finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography.
00:05:41
Speaker
Commenting on artists such as Avadon, Clifford, Maplethorpe, and Nadar, Barth presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject along with Susan Sontag's on photography.
00:06:11
Speaker
So yeah, that's the book jacket synopsis of the contents of Camera Lucida. But Brendan and Helen, do you want to just add any sort of other details or personal interjections about what this thing is about?
00:06:32
Speaker
Bart tells us up front what he's going to do. He says right in the first paragraph that he was overcome by an ontological desire. He wanted to learn at all costs what photography was in itself, and notice that very
00:06:49
Speaker
Aristotelian phrase in itself. So this is an attempt by a non-photographer with a background in philosophy and semiotics to sort of figure out the quiddity of photography, photography with capital P I think, which in Bart's mind I think was a distinct medium that he believed that he could simply by means of abstract analysis sort of
00:07:18
Speaker
define in an ontological sense. So this is really a work of philosophy as much as it's a work of art. Well, actually much more than it's a work of artistic criticism, I think.
Critiques and Personal Reflections on Barthes
00:07:31
Speaker
And I don't want to tip my hand too early, but I think I had more of a negative reaction to this book than either of you. Pun intended. Pun intended after the fact because it didn't even occur to me when it came out of my mouth.
00:07:44
Speaker
Helen, do you want to add to how I explained this at all? I know that you had a better experience reading this or rereading it in your case than I did. Yeah, I think I would go a step further and say it was explicitly a philosophical text and photography is just the vehicle for what he is trying to explore here.
00:08:07
Speaker
I have to admit that this is my only experience reading Bart. Have either of you read any of his other texts? No, but when I was in high school, I bought a book at Barnes and Noble, which was a new thing back when I was in high school. It was very exciting to go to a Barnes and Noble. They put my purchase in a bag,
00:08:34
Speaker
with a quote that said, literature is the question without the answer attributed to Roland Barthes. And that stuck in my head when I was, I don't know, 16 or 17, and I've remembered it ever since. And when I first read it, I thought that's a nonsensical thing to say by someone who's trying to sound intelligent.
00:08:54
Speaker
But now, 25 years later, I sometimes find myself thinking of that quote and thinking, yeah, that's spot on. But up until reading Camera Lucida, the entirety of my exposure to Bart was a shopping bag from the year 1996.
Zen Buddhism and Photography's Democratization
00:09:11
Speaker
Just to interject for a second, because it's relevant to your
00:09:16
Speaker
anecdote there. I read some secondary literature on the original publication of Camera Lucida in France, because it was obviously translated for Anglophone audiences. And they cut out, I think, unfortunately, some of the more Buddhist elements, specifically Zen. And of all people, Helen, you know this person, and actually Brendan, too, because I jabber on about him all the time, Chogyam Trungpa,
00:09:43
Speaker
The Tibetan Buddhist, very famous, arguably one of the most important practitioners to sort of translate in quotes Buddhism for an American audience was Trungpa. And so both Zen terminology, which does remain to some degree Satori, which is sort of like a wakefulness Zen term, shows up even in the English translation.
00:10:07
Speaker
But it sounds like actually Buddhism was on Bart's mind, and it actually permeated this text more thoroughly than the translation reveals. I think, unfortunately, it seems. But anyway, I just thought I'd add, Zen actually does play a role in this book.
00:10:24
Speaker
Well, do you know what the rationale there was? Because off the top of my head, I might say, well, they assumed Americans are stupid and they don't want to know anything about Zen Buddhism, but that's not the kind of American that this book was being marketed to. I mean, they were not selling this at the airport, I don't think.
00:10:41
Speaker
You know, all I know is that the main Barth's person, so far as I can
Personal Journeys in Photography
00:10:48
Speaker
tell, in Anglophone scholarship is a guy named Jeffrey Bachchan, who I think you have a book of too, Helen. He's written a couple. One is called something like Writing Degree Zero or Photography Degree Zero, which is a bunch of scholars, photography academics that
00:11:07
Speaker
are commenting exclusively on camera Lucida, but he himself has written a couple other books exclusively about Barths. And all I got was from his introduction and some of the essays scattered throughout photography degree zero that this editorial decision was made. But as to why it was made, I think they didn't go into it or I'd had two glasses of wine at the point at which I had read it and now forgot.
00:11:35
Speaker
I say they weren't selling this at the airport, but my copy of Madness and Civilization by Foucault I actually purchased in the WH Smiths in Chicago Midway, so who the hell knows? Well, I think to put a period on that point,
00:11:52
Speaker
If you're going to go with a Roland Barthes book as a non like Barthes head or like someone who's been like steeped in continental philosophy or I guess like semiotics or French structuralism and I'm going to lean on Helen probably unfairly to define French structuralism. I have no idea what that means.
00:12:12
Speaker
That's some tangled up difficult stuff. So I do think in a way it's actually correct to say this would be the bar's book that's in an airport if there's going to be one. I would agree. If there's going to be one in the airport, it's probably this one. Or the lover's discourse. I don't know. I have that book. I haven't read it.
00:12:32
Speaker
I think we should all then say not only are we naive readers of Bart here, so there might be more going on in the text than we realize, but also I was aware of reading the translation and that much was lost with the French. One thing I know about the French
00:12:51
Speaker
thinkers that I don't get to enjoy enough because my aptitude with French is poor is how much every word is packed with meaning and that you can really play
00:13:06
Speaker
with puns and with multiple meanings. And that usually happens in these texts that sometimes, if we're lucky, a translator will talk about that phenomenon and try to point out where it really matters, but we miss it in the English. So I also cut that too, Robert, that some commentators, in fact, when I did a quick search on just secondary literature having to do with this text, there were a great deal of articles having
00:13:34
Speaker
you know, mentioning that the translation in English was pretty poor and was missing a lot of nuance.
00:13:40
Speaker
And I do have a humble but hot take on why Zen, in particular, and Satori, maybe more specifically, is important to this text and important to Bart in this project that he is, or whatever, these arguments that he's making. And so I am excited to make my case, however ill-informed it is, as to what I think he's sort of getting at with Zen, at least from one or two angles.
00:14:10
Speaker
you know, that I could defend my positions with. But, you know, the other thing I wanted to bring up is I brought this, you know, we came to discuss this book also in part because as I've been reading, I guess you could call it like history of photography books, and even like philosophy of photography books.
00:14:32
Speaker
the more I realized from reading them just how much camera Lucida shows up. It's everywhere. I mean, I think it's arguably the most cited book on photography amongst photographer specialists or photography writers.
00:14:51
Speaker
maybe of all time. I know that's how photography degree zero positions the book, but I feel like I can attest to it at least in part because I'm seeing it in so many other books that are dealing with photography. So part of what I
00:15:06
Speaker
thought you know I think we're why we're here together is to maybe make sense of why even if we have different takes on the value of the book or ultimately how good or quote unquote bad it is just why is this so darn important why is it maintained its importance on some level even if it is dated maybe to some degree and then maybe
00:15:32
Speaker
Also, why we all are drawn to photography, because we each have our own relationships and histories regarding how we've come to appreciate and even take photos at different points in our lives. Helen, you're by far the most active photographer amongst us at this point.
00:15:52
Speaker
But do you think that'd be a good way to just ease further into this discussion? Maybe each of us could share what brought us to photography, why we're interested in it, and then get into more of the nitty gritty of the book.
Philosophical and Emotional Impact of Photography
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, we can do that. I mean, I grew up around cameras. I remember being on vacation with my dad and he would always have three or four lenses. And if I was lucky, when I was like seven or eight, he would let me carry one of the big telephoto lenses.
00:16:23
Speaker
I think I bought a 1969 Nikon F at a camera show when I was probably about 15. I had a darkroom in the basement in high school. I shot medium format and large format and developed it on my own. I don't think I ever really seriously thought that I would make a career out of it because I don't think that I was talented enough, but I also don't think that I ever thought I was talented enough. I just really loved it and I loved the
00:16:49
Speaker
almost every aspect of it, the mechanical aspect of taking a photo and developing a photo as well as the aesthetic experience of seeing a photo. But I never really read much theory. I had no real interest in it, and I was the kind of kid who would read theory about anything almost. I would seek out books like that. But when it came to photography, I don't know why, but I just didn't
00:17:17
Speaker
I think the only book I ever read was Ansel Adams published a series which was really more about the mechanics of taking pictures than about anything to do with the theory or the philosophy of photography. And so here we are all these years later when I don't do anything related to photography anymore and I haven't in years.
00:17:37
Speaker
In fact, Robert, the last time I was in a dark room was with you. And at that point, you were a much better developer than I was because I'd been away from it for so many years. But here we are. This book is really my first dive into the theory behind some of this stuff. But Helen, so you are an active photographer in addition to having a photography podcast. So how did you get into it? Like, what's your history with it?
00:18:04
Speaker
It's funny because I think that anything that you really get into, it's hard to explain it in retrospect because you often don't know why. You don't know why that's the thing that you go toward and say, in this case, maybe instead of painting, although some people probably paint and also are photographers.
00:18:27
Speaker
But I have always enjoyed looking at photographs as a kid. I was one of those kids that always looked through all of the albums over and over again and took some sort of pleasure in the way that photographs looked. Not so much the content, but just, you know, everything else about them. But my introduction to taking a photograph in a way that was different than the point and shoots that, say, my family had,
00:18:57
Speaker
was through a boyfriend who was taking photography in high school, which I just would tag along with him. He had these assignments and then I was the one who got into it. I was like, let's stop there. Let's try to get that. And that was the part that really grabbed me is that seeing some sort of scene
00:19:18
Speaker
with lit in a certain way and seeing if I could replicate that precisely with the film. And you can't. It's really hard sometimes. I wasn't picking easy daylight things. I was picking nighttime diffuse light and really not understanding why it was that it was so difficult to
00:19:42
Speaker
to get the exposures. And it didn't help that I was in a high school that emphasized sports more than it did anything else. And so the photography class was really quite vocational and focused on basic composition and just like the technical aspects, but not anything really expressive. So that was maybe a disservice. I was on a science track. So pursuing photography at some point,
00:20:11
Speaker
conflicted with required classes to get into science programs. And then in college, although I was interested in continuing to work in the darkroom and take photography classes, I couldn't really afford it with a science load, afford it because it would cost more to have a double degree, but just the load itself was a lot. So I sort of set it aside and did it as a hobby for a long time.
00:20:37
Speaker
even though I ran a darkroom at some point in college, was that kid at the desk, and I was able to go in there and print some photographs myself. But it was actually during that job that another student came in with literally hundreds of frames that he had taken
00:21:03
Speaker
with his SLR and it just like killed my interest entirely when I realized that one could eventually get an exquisite photograph if you just had the shutter going the entire time. Somehow, like I was always trying to
00:21:26
Speaker
take the one frame, set it up and take the one frame and get exactly what I wanted. And then, you know, through series of being disappointed because I was taking the frame and not, and then seeing it come back and it wasn't what I expected. It just, it killed me that this guy was coming in with hundreds of frames. So I actually didn't photograph for a really long time.
00:21:48
Speaker
totally set it aside. And it was only years later that my partner at the time noticed that I was taking all of these photographs with his camera and decided to purchase a camera for me. He's like, you need this more than I do. And yeah, so then I started to get into it in a more expressive way and actually
00:22:13
Speaker
returned to study color printing, which is really where my interest is, is in expressive color photography. So actually, I have a very painterly interest even though, because I like to see if I can get as much
00:22:31
Speaker
density of color in a photograph as I can, but at the same time, compositionally, I'm more interested in the built environment and some of the, not abstract, but more what unexpected scenes in the built environment can convey to us about what's going on in our larger social milieu. So not documentary, but landscape.
00:23:00
Speaker
You know, when you bring up painting, it makes me think that I think when I was in high school and I was, or even earlier when I was getting into photography, I think part of it was that I knew that I had no talent for drawing or painting or illustrating or anything like that, which was really frustrating for me because my dad could.
00:23:20
Speaker
In addition to being a photographer, he was a very good visual artist and I did not inherit even a trace of that. And I think that was part of what drew me to photography was that that was my way to be creative in a visual medium.
00:23:33
Speaker
And maybe for that reason, I never saw it. I don't think I've ever minimized photography. I don't think I've ever done that. But I think in my mind, it was like, well, I don't have the talent to paint or to sketch. So this is what I get to do instead. So even though photography felt special to me,
00:23:56
Speaker
It also maybe felt to me like something that was quite clearly on the same spectrum as all the other visual arts just happened to be the one that a talentless person like me got to take advantage of. It's interesting that you make that connection that photography is available to you because you don't have talent.
00:24:20
Speaker
Well, I'm going a little bit overboard. I think I did have some modest talent as a photographer that maybe if I'd really pursued it, it could have gone somewhere. I don't think I was an absolute hopeless hack. I understood things about composition and lighting and everything. But up until the advent of photography,
00:24:38
Speaker
This is something Bart does not get into at all. If you didn't have the talent to sketch or paint, then that was it. You were never going to enter the field of visual creativity. Photography changed that. It gave people who could perhaps see things in their minds, but didn't have the motor skills or the brain wiring to make their hands make those things.
00:25:08
Speaker
could now make those things using a machine or a series of machines and chemical processes. And that had never existed before in history. And I do think that is something that makes photography unique, but it's also not something that Bart ever touches on.
00:25:21
Speaker
Just to add to that for a second, because I like any excuse to bring up Walter Benjamin. And he is certainly not the first to have brought this up. But he did go into, I think in his little history of photography, but it might have been elsewhere, the democratizing release of photography as a medium that made accessible to the masses, at least middle class, lower middle class
00:25:50
Speaker
middle-class folks access to an art form that they could sort of become Autodidax of and I think that certainly when you get to the first more or less stable 35 millimeter camera or maybe even the brownies they're not particularly expensive and they're not super hard to use so not to be dismissive of back to I think both of your points which is
00:26:14
Speaker
the best photographers are the best photographers for a reason in that it's extremely hard to master this art form. But I do think to add to your point, Brendan, there's also a egalitarianism that I think came with photography where those who couldn't afford to go to ballet school or art schools or get painting classes, they're sort of blocked out of those not only
00:26:43
Speaker
practices, but even occupations as stratospherically hard as it's always been to get that good at any of those things. And so I think in addition to it being amenable to amateur autodidactic artists, so to speak, it also was sort of radical in its egalitarianism in that there was a much lower bar for entry in terms of financially what you had to cough up.
00:27:13
Speaker
in order to get a camera in your hand and start taking photographs. And I think that is kind of an incredible thing, even with the oversaturation of images today, which I'm sure we'll touch on in some way, shape or form, but just wanted to add that.
Photography's Ontology and Emotional Evocation
00:27:27
Speaker
I wonder if, because there were certainly a lot of hand wringing of different kinds when photography was invented, and I wonder if a subset of that hand wringing was sort of gatekeeper hand wringing over the idea of the dirty masses all of a sudden having access to this egalitarian creative technology. So Robert, what about you? You've been known to have a camera in your hand from time to time.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah. Um, let me try to do this as quickly as I can, but come at it from sort of a strange angle. I was not a happy camper as an 18 year old, and I did wind up going to college straight out of high school. And I wound up majoring in film production because I had it in my head after watching more movies than I care to admit as an only child that I wanted to be a filmmaker.
00:28:22
Speaker
But then I realized, again, quite quickly in my first film classes, oh, filmmaking requires collaboration. And if you're going to be a director, that requires stage managing. And stage managing requires confidence. And confidence requires at least the pretend to be able to feign extraversion. And I'm definitely a proud, card-carrying introvert. So it just was not going to work for me.
00:28:51
Speaker
Do you have something you want to say, Brandon? I see it. I see the lights in the eyes. I was just wondering if someone demands to see your introvert card. Do you just put your wallet away and walk in the other direction? I just start crying usually. Um, it's like when the sarcasm detector explodes on the Simpsons. It's too, too, too many, too many layers. You just, you can see just reaching for my anti anxiety meds. That's how you know that I'm an introvert. So, um,
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, I came back for my first summer break from college, kind of crestfallen, and probably overwhelmed on some back of the brainstem level. Like, how the hell am I going to get through this if I can't even manage folks on student films? And I think, I mean, I'm probably adding a little bit of mythologizing to this. But I did wind up in Garcia Street Books
00:29:49
Speaker
Gosh, I'm so I'm so private on this podcast. I'm like, I've tipped my hat as to where I live geographically beyond New Mexico. Whatever. I won't say more. So I'm in that bookstore. I pulled down a book by Charles Bukowski in the poetry section.
00:30:06
Speaker
You've heard this story, Brendan. I don't know if you heard this, Helen, but I opened the book and it said in its opening stanza before you get to the actual poems, I see the old ladies in the supermarket angry and alone.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I remember just going, I've seen those old ladies in the supermarket and I like that line. So I bought the book and it was the first book that I had voluntarily chosen to read for a long, like in a long time. And then I realized, oh, I really love reading. I knew that, but I sort of had to rediscover it.
00:30:40
Speaker
And then I was like, oh, there's a film studies track instead of a film production track. And that's more like a literary track. Like we can read theory, we can read film criticism. I can continue in this introverted writerly mode rather than this extroverted filmmaker mode. Although this is probably unfair. I'm sure there's plenty of incredible filmmakers that if we press them, we'd find out that they're heavy duty introverts. So it's possible. It's just at that time it wasn't for me.
00:31:10
Speaker
Basically i bring this up because photography then became i did finish with a film studies degree and i did i think on some level always feel drawn to images not just movies but just in general like i i loved
00:31:27
Speaker
photos. I loved movies. I love just being awash in images. So not quite like Helen's description, although that was really interesting that the way you talked about like how you were relating to them before you had engaged in photographic practice yourself.
00:31:45
Speaker
But I think in the, again, in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm not giving up on being a filmmaker, but I'm not extroverted enough to do it.
00:31:58
Speaker
was a little bit older, I bought a analog camera, 35 millimeter, and was like, um, maybe this is the introvert's route to filmmaking, you know, like, because you don't need anyone else. You just go out and take photos by yourself. And Dark Rooms, by the way, for any introverted listeners is the ultimate nightclub of introverts.
00:32:21
Speaker
because it's a nightclub of one or maybe two and you get to play your own music. You know, that's fucking cool. Yeah. So that's it, man. Like I came to photography as a bypass from film production and fell in love with it. And then Helen actually met in grad school and she was already really pretty deep into her own practice.
00:32:46
Speaker
I was coming at it as a beginner, but she was charitable enough to show me the ropes a little bit. And we wound up doing a number of road trips together and taking photos together. And that was really my my first deep exposure, pun intended to actual photography. So, yeah, and I haven't really kept it up since. And I felt a little conflicted about it, but it is what it is, I guess. So.
00:33:16
Speaker
Robert, I know that you teach and I wonder, have you ever thought about filmmaking as teaching? Can you say a little more? Just in the way that the director is in a position that is like the teacher in front of a classroom. Everybody is just sort of waiting for their marching orders or maybe they know their marching orders and they come back and they show you what they've done and you
00:33:44
Speaker
you give them feedback or guide them in the direction that you want. I'm just curious because maybe teaching is really fatiguing for you, but it occurred to me that they were similar.
00:34:00
Speaker
I think it's a good point. And to add to that, you know, last week Robert, you and I talked about a Claire Denis film, and I was listening to a conversation with a film critic one time who mentioned that he had had a conversation with Denis one time where she said to him something along the lines of, and she's a very like meek. If you ever see her interviewed, she's not an assuming sort of person at all. She's a very retiring sort of person. But she told this critic, um,
00:34:27
Speaker
I am not a very confident person, so my films have to be. Yeah, I mean, I love that line and I think
00:34:36
Speaker
maybe to try to synthesize what both of you have shared. Back to you, Helen, you exposed me to this photographer who had set up like a trip wire in like a city street so he could get portraits without people realizing on some level their portraits were being taken. This is brilliant photographer and there's an incredible photo of a rabbi or at least an orthodox, Hasidic
00:35:02
Speaker
Jew, I think in New York, that had his photo involuntarily taken. I remember seeing that image and others from that series. There was one of a police officer, other people that were getting their involuntary portraits taken. And I can't remember if you brought this up or if it came up in the book, but it felt right where it's like these are movies in a single frame.
00:35:25
Speaker
So that also was really compelling, this idea that like you could tell a story in one image and you don't need a million dollars to produce incredibly compelling visuals. I just like that idea again of like,
00:35:40
Speaker
a one person. Hopefully this isn't like an updated neoliberal, unconscious definition of rugged individualism as seen through a photographer who doesn't need to collaborate. But I do think on some level there's a beauty in like you don't need to have a bunch of money and a bunch of equipment and a bunch of people and all this stuff to pull something off that's incredible.
00:36:09
Speaker
and compelling and worthy of sharing. So in a sense, we read this in English and we're not falling all over ourselves to give a definition of French structuralism, but
00:36:27
Speaker
All three of us have a background in photography and also all three of us have a background in philosophy. And so in some sense, we are the target audience for a book like this, but we did not at all have the same experience reading it, I don't think.
00:36:45
Speaker
And I think it might be obvious by this point that I'm the one who's not going to be a fan of this book. The podcast isn't over yet. We might convince you. I was going to say, you're going to have to make a case here, I think.
00:37:02
Speaker
Well, so, Helen, this was a reread for you, right? Robert, was this your first time or was this a reread? Reread. Okay, so what was either one of you, whoever feels inspired more, I guess, what did you think of this? Maybe back when you read it before and then rereading it for this? I'll go because I was surprised to
00:37:30
Speaker
to get so much out of it. I was actually just quite shocked at how exquisite this text was. When my memory of it, when Robert brought it up, I was like, oh, sure, yeah, we can talk about that. Like how Blase, another text by another French white guy, I think we've maybe exhausted the French
00:37:56
Speaker
The recent French canon is kind of how I feel and photography in our world situation has moved on from their limited vantage in many respects. That was the perspective that I had when Robert mentioned it, but I'm game. It's a small text and it's fun to think about being here with you too and talking about it.
00:38:17
Speaker
And then I got into it and I was shocked. So it might be worth mentioning that I couldn't actually remember when I had read it. I had read it only once and I knew that it was at least
00:38:32
Speaker
ten years ago but I couldn't really pinpoint when it was that I had read it until I began to read it again and I saw all my notes in the margins and then I realized that I read it as part of a class on a film class actually, Robert. It was the very first class I took when I returned to school so I mentioned that I was on the science track. I left the scientific field that I was initially in to go back
00:39:01
Speaker
to school to study literature. And when I first started to take graduate courses in literature, the first class was a class on cinephilia.
00:39:13
Speaker
Just to digress a little bit, in science, it's pretty rigorous. You have to have a lot of math and statistics. The way that you synthesize articles is just complicated. It's pretty rigorous, everything from study design and so forth. So I was a little shocked that I could go to a class, a graduate class, two times a week. And one of those days, you're just watching a movie.
00:39:44
Speaker
And then your homework was to read some of this, you know, read some theory and then come back with responses to the movie. I was like, really? This is how the other half lives? Over on the humanity side, we have no standards for anything.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, I did look into it and see what the GRE limits were and they were like, you know, sometimes they're not even required. Anyway, so I had read this book, but really, I had had no experience with philosophy or theory at that point. So being that it was a class on synophilia, it was about those like, what is it or what stands out
00:40:23
Speaker
certain films that end up making, you know, a film beloved or that a film that that people return to or even those moments that inspire filmmakers to become filmmakers or to make films. And often it's exactly the kind of thing that Barthe talks about this idea of the punctum or this like something in a frame that wasn't intended to be there that is the thing that grabs you and you know a whole bunch of the
00:40:50
Speaker
French New Wave talk about those moments in their films and you can see it in the way that they make them, you know, thinking about breathless and, you know, it really, for example, Jean-Luc Godard's breathless and how it brings in all of these contingent elements into scenes. He's really working with it as an example. So when I read this text, I was indexing on these elements about what makes something likable.
00:41:19
Speaker
And I wasn't alone. I think that this is the way that people really usually read this text and in the scans of secondary literature I've seen so often, it talks about the content of the book. It's what the studio is, what the punctum is, various elements of photographs that Bart ends up saying that stand out to him. So it becomes this like reader in this almost romantic version of a photograph
00:41:49
Speaker
Not talking so much about the technical skill, but leaving intact in the first half of the book a nice, critical,
00:42:00
Speaker
posture that the educated can assume, but with this other elite vantage of being able to identify those elements of photographs that make a photograph great, which I think is a mistake and a misreading. But what stood out for me and what totally changed my
00:42:25
Speaker
My outlook on this text is that, is the palanode in the middle of the text, which is an apology? So at some point after he goes through this whole effort of describing somewhat systematically what a studium is versus what a punctum is, he then has to apologize for it. Why does he issue this whole second half of the book as an apology for the first?
00:42:51
Speaker
And I think outside of the recording, in some of the texts that we prepared for this recording,
00:43:01
Speaker
It's come up that this is a book about grief. It's very obviously about grief. But the structure of the text is that this very personal, inexplicable, irrational second half of the text is a correction for the first part of the text. That means that the first part of the text, the systematic part, the more academic or intellectual, overstepped in some way. It's the same structure
00:43:29
Speaker
that Plato gave to the Phaedrus, one of the dialogues on Eros. And it's also evident in the structure of the other erotic dialogue, the symposium, in the trade-off, the hand-off between Socrates and Alcabiti. So this part, I was so impressed that he, Bart, was able to
00:43:58
Speaker
write the text so finally as to like undo the first part. And then once I clued into that structure,
00:44:11
Speaker
It became apparent that when people read this text, they tend to fall to one side or the other. Either they apply practically the studium and the punctum, or they talk about the, maybe Bart's grief, or they talk about that extremely subjective point of view in appreciating a photograph. But they don't hold those two things in tension, which I think is what
00:44:41
Speaker
which is what the real function of the text is. And so it becomes not about
00:44:46
Speaker
photography, but it becomes about this tension between the more systematic or the way that we group photographs or group something together as having to decide between something like a studium and a punctum, and then this other part that cannot be explained that way. And these two things are two sides of the same coin. And photography here is a cipher for
00:45:14
Speaker
illuminating that kind of impossible ecstatic position of the person in between.
00:45:23
Speaker
It's interesting as you were speaking, Helen, and I'm sort of shocked. It must have crossed my mind consciously while we were reading the book, but you really brought, you surfaced this for me, which is another writer, John Berger, who's arguably as famous, if not more famous than Bart, who wrote what was the famous, the most famous book, Brendan. Do you happen to know?
00:45:51
Speaker
There's one called understanding a photograph. There's another one called like how to see, I think I have to look it up, but he's way more accessible on some level. Like he's more of a, what's the word, like an informal essayist versus like a trained philosopher writing in a philosophical or academic register. But in some ways they're both tending to the same themes, which I guess in part would be,
00:46:22
Speaker
just having an emotional response to an image and not getting too lost in the weeds with more technical considerations. Or maybe to put it differently, not letting one's analysis overwhelm or even negate the emotional connection.
00:46:43
Speaker
And I do think Bart did a nice job, even in his some of the more difficult moments of this text. And I can't say I understood everything because it's tough, but I respect that he's willing to discuss emotions as it relates to interacting with a photo.
00:47:03
Speaker
Versus a kind of cold or clinical analysis. I'm it's interesting that both of you say that and Helen I did I thought what you said was.
00:47:14
Speaker
remarkably persuasive, and I will go back with that in mind and look at it again. My sense from reading the book as a whole for the first time was that he had done exactly the opposite of what you just said, Robert, that this was a book that was almost totally devoid of any actual emotional relationship with photographs for any reason other than that they might happen to be of his dead mother.
00:47:44
Speaker
but that this was all analysis and mostly analysis that was based on a misunderstanding of what photography is. But I'm open to the idea that that is my misreading. I don't know if he cares what photography is. Yeah. Yeah. Can you elaborate on that? It's not necessarily agreeing with you, but we're in a similar plane is that I don't think the book is about photography. I think it's about adventure.
00:48:16
Speaker
Yeah, what kind of, we talking like a cruise, we talking jumping out of a plane, what kind of adventure? Getting hit by a milk truck. Oh God. Yeah. Too soon? Too late. Yeah, he's living his adventure, that's for sure.
00:48:36
Speaker
And I'm only able to clue into this because I happen to be working with the philosophy of Georgio Gambon, who has this book called The Adventure, where he talks about—and I can't detail the etymology because that's not my
00:48:53
Speaker
And it's not my reason for reading it, but I know that Agamben is in dialogue with some people that Barthe was in dialogue with, including Blanchot, who's quoted in the text at length.
00:49:09
Speaker
The adventure is something from Middle Ages, French troubadours that talked about these romantic adventures. But the thing about an adventure etymologically is that it's the beginning of something, but it's not separate from the telling. So it's like this living
00:49:33
Speaker
writing at the same time. So Bart mentions adventure in the book, and unfortunately I don't have the page number in front of me. But when I saw it, I of course thought of these other thinkers who talk about it, especially Agamben, and about how he has titled this text, Camera Lucida,
00:50:03
Speaker
It's not camera obscura, so it's not a photograph in the sense like a photograph is always made through the camera obscura, light entering into a box and exciting something on the back plane. But a camera lucida is a different instrument. It's an optical instrument, but it's a participation of an image that
00:50:29
Speaker
through one side of the prism that's projecting onto a surface where the person can see with their other eye. So looking through this prism, you have this illusion of, say, a modeler drawing on a piece of paper, and then you draw it with the other hand. So this is not just a passive capture,
00:50:55
Speaker
of light, it's a participation in creating the image itself. So that's what I think he's performing the text, and that's what I don't think it's about because he's writing it. He's writing the image of his mother, which is not in the book, but he starts by not writing the image. He starts by trying to intellectually, from a distance, describe what might be going on, and then only
00:51:24
Speaker
once he has that structure there as the model, can he really write the photograph of his mother? So I don't think it's about photography. I think it's about this other act of writing the story of the photograph of his mother's image. I think I agree with that. I think what I differ is that
00:51:52
Speaker
I find the result unsatisfying because I think that the process was flawed, fatally flawed. But I agree with you that ultimately what this is about grief, it's his attempt to come to terms with his mother's death and the fact that he has these photographs of her left behind after her death.
00:52:16
Speaker
I had a similar sense reading this, Robert, actually to reading Benjamin on film when Benjamin is talking about movies, where it's like reading about art by somebody who doesn't have any kind of actual relationship to art. When I look at a photograph, my first reaction to it is almost always aesthetic.
00:52:41
Speaker
how does it look before I even think about what it's a photo of? And there are, I mean, there are exceptions to this. Like if I'm looking through an old family scrapbook of snapshots that were taken for the sake of memories, or if I'm looking at news photographs that are, you know, of a disturbing nature or something like that, but almost every other time I'm responding to the composition and the lighting and all of the choices made by the photographer.
00:53:11
Speaker
And after that, I think about all the other things that I can think about. But my initial reaction is an unmediated, aesthetic reaction of I like this or I don't like this. I think this is beautiful or compelling or I don't think this is beautiful or compelling. Bart writes like someone who has never had that experience in his life.
00:53:36
Speaker
And I think that's fine for him to be that way. I think for someone to sit down and write what they think is going to be a book where they explore the essence of this thing, I think that is a fatal shortcoming. And what he tries to replace it with is philosophy brain.
00:53:56
Speaker
And I say that dismissively. I have a background. I mean, I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy. It's not- Are there medications for philosophy brain? Yeah, alcohol. Alcohol and other medications that are classified substances on the federal schedule. There is a- Project runway is pretty good too. Especially when combined with alcohol.
00:54:27
Speaker
But there is a tradition in philosophy that goes back, at least in Western philosophy, that goes back to the ancient Greeks, which is if we just think the right way, we can understand the world and we can figure things out. And that tendency in philosophy is totally understandable.
00:54:49
Speaker
and I've fallen victim to it many times in my own life. And it is also completely false. And it's a lot easier for people who live in an age of neurology and fMRI's and CAT scans to understand what the problems with that idea are. But that idea was the guiding principle for philosophy in the West for 2000 years.
00:55:18
Speaker
right, all the way up through the phenomenologist that Bart is a product of, right? Hegel is gonna sit down and he's just gonna by God think about this shit and he's gonna think about it better than Kant did and he's gonna think about it better than Leibniz did and he's gonna work it all out. Until Marx comes in and just slaps him upside the head.
00:55:38
Speaker
What's among his feet? Well, yeah, yes, absolutely. And Marx, at least, by looking at economics, was looking at something that he could pull some kind of empirical data from. And Bart, I think, is approaching… It reminds me of what would happen if you gave a camera to Aristotle.
00:55:59
Speaker
Like if you just handed Aristotle a camera and you were like, yeah, you press the button and then you get the picture. Right. And that's a great fucking idea by the way. This is how you arrive at Bill and Ted's. That'd be a good series though. Like if you had to ask like, what would Aristotle photograph if he had a camera in his hand? I like that.
00:56:20
Speaker
Right. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. What would happen if Beethoven got into the music store at the mall? What happens if you give Beethoven a, it's a, I think it's just a Casio keyboard. It's a shame it wasn't like a Moog synthesizer or something, but anyway.
00:56:36
Speaker
If you gave Aristotle a camera and then told him to write a treatise about it, this is what you would end up with. All this discussion of essence and being and confusion of subjective impressions with objective philosophical categories and
00:56:55
Speaker
you know, one of the great, and I don't mean this to turn into a rant, but one of the great tendencies of philosophy, one of the great negative tendencies of philosophy is this tendency to reify things that should not be reified. Like, one of the great philosophical questions is, why is there something rather than nothing? And I don't know the answer to that question, but the best answer that I've ever heard to that question is, there's something rather than nothing because there can't be nothing.
00:57:26
Speaker
language lets us say there can be nothing so therefore we think it means something to say there is nothing but that is just language playing a trick on us and then we reify nothing and we make it a capital N and we write books called Being and Nothingness and we talk about being versus becoming versus non-being as though these are all things but these are not things these are empty concepts that have words attached to them and
00:57:53
Speaker
I'm sorry. I think I have some past trauma that I'm processing at the moment. Please, Helen, jump in. I was just going to say, Robert, this is a good point for you to bring up Buddhism. Well, actually, it's okay. Let me mount my defense because I'll start by saying I'm with you. Some of the language employed in this book is maddening and frustrating.
00:58:21
Speaker
and he does capitalize things and he does actually I looked up a little bit more about his process apparently he was famous or infamous for making up terms and then defining them or failing to define them but he even uses words that
00:58:36
Speaker
do in fact exist, but it was the first time I'd encountered them. You don't encounter a lot of these words in normal human discourse. Even, I think, at the academic level, there's a lot of curveballs. So I'm saying, I agree with you that there's aspects of this text that are a slog. I think I was a little more willing to take from it what I thought was really valuable or dynamic or compelling.
00:59:05
Speaker
and just ignore charitably the things that I'll put it on myself I could not get to the bottom of or didn't have the energy to get to the bottom of. So with Helen's plug with Buddhism, I actually don't interpret how he presents this book on photography, reflections on photography as a reification
00:59:33
Speaker
of photography and all of its complexities. I actually see him presenting it as a incredibly dynamic, not only art form, but I think experience, because he is speaking from the perspective of the viewer, of the spectator, of the person looking at images. And I can just say, I have like 3000 things I want to say, but let me avoid, like,
00:59:58
Speaker
falling into brain mush bifurcations and just try to keep my eye on the prize here. He talks about death. Back to your point, Helen, that he's on some level grieving the loss of his mother
01:00:14
Speaker
It's sort of notorious that he chose not to include the image and his reason being on some level that there's so many, there's so many layers of meaning attached to this image, but there's so many layers of meaning attached to this image for me, Roland Barth. And if Helen saw it or if Brendan saw it or if Robert saw it, we don't have that.
01:00:39
Speaker
intense history with this person that would activate all of this feeling as we encounter the image. So for him, it's there. For us, it sounds like he's making the argument, we're not going to click with it in that way. And therefore he's reluctant to share it. But I think there's more than just that reason. But really what I'm driving at is he winds up reflecting not just on his mother specifically, but more generally on death.
01:01:10
Speaker
And the fragility of being a human being, the fragility of being finite, and maybe to now fold in the Buddhist piece, this isn't what Satori means. Satori in its most basic definition, I think, is just enlightenment. But there's another term that's very common in Zen Buddhism, and you'll encounter it if you ever read up on the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who I know Helen you love. I really love his work.
01:01:39
Speaker
The term is mano no aware, and mano no aware means the transience of things. So sort of the inevitability of change. And then to link that up with this book, the inevitability or the inevitable trend towards death and the fragility of anything that is
01:02:01
Speaker
in a state of transition. And I think the argument could be that anything in the phenomenal world is in a constant state of change, even if it's not immediately perceivable or perceptible to the human eye. And so I think if you give him a chance and you give him the benefit of the doubt as he's making his points, when he finally gets to the center of the Tootsie Roll Pop as the book
01:02:30
Speaker
What's the word? Laser beams on the theme of death. Then I think you get into some very interesting territory. He's not just reflecting on the death of his mother. He's reflecting on the transient nature of experience and how each photo in and of itself is dealing with transience and death on multiple levels. So you have the death of that moment.
01:03:00
Speaker
it is at the same time keeping something alive that has already passed as it exists in the photograph. But the actual moment is gone. And so then he complexifies it, I think, in a very compelling way by basically driving at, you're encountering always a kind of living corpse in a photograph.
01:03:26
Speaker
you're encountering either the corpse of the moment that has died, or the corpse of the person that's no longer that person, either in the literal sense, like they're no longer alive, like his mother, or in the more gradual sense of my former self, whoever I was even one moment ago is not myself right now.
01:03:47
Speaker
and therefore there's a kind of corpse in terms of ourselves engaged in a constant state of change. But then he gets even deeper with this and says, all photos, and I think it's easier to deal with people in this regard, although I think we could do it with just about anything
01:04:08
Speaker
are pointing to our deaths, and when we die, they remain, and they remain as a kind of living corpse. So we encounter the image in our lives, like if I make it to 80, and I look at a photo of me when I'm 20, I'm gonna burn all my photos so I don't have to do this, but if I keep them right, I'm looking on some level at the corpse of my young self, but I'm also reminded
01:04:38
Speaker
not only in interfacing with that image as an older version of me that no longer looks like that at all in many regards, it's also saying you're gonna die. Now, let me just add one final twist to this because I think it's like there's so much meat here. I'd love to spend more time. We could do a whole podcast just on how he deals with death or how he navigates death through the lens, pun intended of photography.
01:05:08
Speaker
But the actual paper that that image is fixed on is also in a state of decay and undergoing a process of death itself. So I do think that on the face of it, he's dealing with his mother and that's true. But just beneath that, you have this unbelievably complex
01:05:31
Speaker
series of investigations and reflections on the nature of existence and also by extension the nature of death. And I was absolutely blown away by how much he seemed to be able to
01:05:44
Speaker
not only articulate, but keep in tension without it collapsing in on itself. I thought he pulled it off. So just to finally put a period on my monologue here, my rambling, this is where I'm saying he's not reifying at all, man, because he's actually describing a process that's basically dynamic by its very nature. He's describing a constant state of change at all of these different levels.
01:06:14
Speaker
how this constant state of change links back up with more philosophical reflections on death. So that's what I've got. I don't know if that's what you were looking for, Helen, but that's my halfway Buddhist plug there. Everything that you just said was beautifully put. And I almost want to say that you are
01:06:41
Speaker
describing what Bart was trying to do better than he actually did it. And the first thing that I think of when I listen to you explain it that way is to ask
01:06:54
Speaker
in what way photography is different from any other context in which I could be said to be interacting with the corpse of my younger self. I am a morbid motherfucker. I think about death all the time. And on top of that, I just have a sort of generally ornery disposition about things in the world. That's why we're friends.
01:07:18
Speaker
Probably it is. And yet, when I look at a photograph of my younger self, which I just did, like literally three days ago, I was at my parents' house, I took down an old scrapbook that had a bunch of old photos of me from when I was a little kid that I hadn't seen in ages. I'm not thinking about death. I'm not thinking about the corpse of my younger self in any way that I'm not also doing those things when I hold an image in my mind, right? And
01:07:50
Speaker
I don't see any qualitative difference between a photograph of myself, a painting of myself, a mental image of, you know, if I'm looking at a photograph of a former lover, for instance, right? It ended badly. There was a lot of heartache involved. If I'm looking at a photograph, in some ways it's nothing compared to what's in my head that I can visualize.
01:08:17
Speaker
I don't it's not that I want to push back on the idea of everything being transient and everything in some sense being a reminder of death. It's that I don't see photography as being qualitatively different. And because Bart wants to put it in its own little ontological silo, there's a phrase that should be like that should be some that should be something ontological silo. I don't know. It's the name of my brain in a vat.
01:08:45
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. But that's where I feel like he goes wrong, and then he leaves it up to us to do the sort of poetic association in a poetic way, which is good, but he's trying to do it in a philosophical way and it just doesn't work. Do you see photography as qualitatively different in that sense? Than other forms, than other art forms? And even then memory, even then an image that you hold in your mind. Yes.
01:09:16
Speaker
I do. Helen, what about you? Yes. Both of you do. Okay, tell me why. No, QED. Oh, the oldest philosophical trick there is. Go ahead, Helen, because I was jabbering, so go for it and then I'll jump in. It's on the outside. It's not your memory. That's what makes it so creepy.
01:09:43
Speaker
I don't know that I agree with that, though. Yes, memory is entirely internal. It is entirely subjective. It is wildly unreliable. But if we're speaking of the emotions that it prompts us to confront, I'm not convinced that it's different. And on top of that, I think that the ability of photography to capture something that is external is simultaneously miraculous.
01:10:13
Speaker
very easy to misunderstand there is there has never been created a device that
01:10:20
Speaker
you point it at something and you press a button and it reproduces the same thing that your eyes, like even your eyes, your brain, it's all doing work, it's all mediated, right? Your brain is filling in gaps, it's letting you see what you want to see, it's doing work to translate photons into different kinds of intelligible shapes and colors, and cameras do the same thing. And in order to create
01:10:50
Speaker
this external thing that looks like an objective recording of reality requires all of this manipulation and all of this mediation where we're just trying to get it to look like what was in our heads already. Yes, it's different. I said this in something that I wrote to both of you before recording. I would give a lot
01:11:16
Speaker
to have a photograph of certain things that happened before photography existed. And I would give more to have a photograph of those things than I would to have a painting of those things. But... Why is that? Why would you rather have a photograph than a painting? Because if a certain set of criteria is met, the photograph will be a more accurate representation of what I would have seen had I been there.
01:11:43
Speaker
But that if certain criteria is met is one of the stumbling blocks that I can't seem to get past. Can I jump in for a second? So John Berger, by the way, the book he wrote that's the most famous of his is called Ways of Seeing. And it's really fucking good. And you both should read it. Well, no one should do anything. You both could read it. Might could. I think it's really good.
01:12:09
Speaker
But he wrote another essay that was very famous. So he's written probably a half dozen very famous essays on photography. One is called Understanding a Photograph. And in that essay, he made this really startling statement. And here's what he said. He said, photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
01:12:33
Speaker
And he then said that painting translates, whereas photography quotes. And I think what he's getting at, which I bring up in part to answer you, Brendan, but in part to like really make an important, I think we need to make these distinctions as clear as we can. Like what is painting doing that photography isn't and vice versa. And so
01:12:58
Speaker
When I read that he's making the claim that photos quote from reality, essentially, again, I'm bringing in Walter Benjamin, so cue the theme music. He's basically saying like you are blasting out of time's continuum, an actual lived moment. And it has that kind of referentiality at any time that you wish to return to it and further that
01:13:28
Speaker
It is a kind of time travel. I might even go so far as to say, as the least scientifically grounded of the three of us, that it might be the only form of time travel that exists right now. And there's an immediacy to it that is so unbelievably exquisite and unmistakable and unique to photography in that sense of,
01:13:55
Speaker
I could look at a photo of Jacob Reis doing his series on how the other half lives from the turn of the 20th century, and they're just as immediate to me as if I were right there.
01:14:11
Speaker
And I think when photos, and maybe this is an argument for art when it's great, really does collapse that sense of chronology, that sense of distance and time. And you're confronted in all of its immediacy and all of its viscerality
01:14:31
Speaker
I'm an encounter with someone you've never met in a time and place that literally probably doesn't exist certainly at the granular level but even broader brush strokes no longer exists and so.
01:14:45
Speaker
painting is, it requires a back to your point with what's different about photography and painting just in terms of training. There's so much more that goes into becoming a master painter, but also what painting is trying to accomplish is a kind of, can I pull out of my imagination some
01:15:07
Speaker
something that is speaking to me in the scene I wish to render or even something completely out of my imagination that I wish to render and photos are not doing that they are and they're not right but they're much more sort of they're they're
01:15:23
Speaker
they are composed of the fabric of reality in a way that paintings are not. And so I like that distinction he makes, even if it is debatable, that photography quotes where paintings translate. What I like about that, about a quote, is that a quote
01:15:44
Speaker
seems like it's exact but it's not it's not like it replicates he doesn't use a word that that implies that the quote has space for almost like in the style of the thing that was real but not the real thing it doesn't collapse that it doesn't say this is the real thing in the photograph because of course we know you know through all it was as Brendan was saying with with the
01:16:15
Speaker
all of the mediation of the various, the chemistry and the apparatus, the type of paper, the fact that so many are black and white and people are not black and white, their color. But the color itself is not real, the color that we see and there's so much variation. It's always a simulacrum of what was, but I quote as a nice phrase,
01:16:41
Speaker
When I like that phrase too, and I'm thinking, Helen, what you said made me start to think about how misleading quotes can be even when they are accurate. That is, you can quote someone with complete accuracy and yet completely mislead your audience about what the meaning of that quote actually is. I was thinking also about the
01:17:06
Speaker
Helen, you talked about the experience that you had that sort of made you get out of photography for a while when that guy came into your dark room with like hundreds of negatives, right? They were all the same girl, like not wearing many clothes, standing in knee-deep water and all I could think of was like, how long has she been there?
01:17:27
Speaker
I thought I asked you not to bring up my college photo exploits on this podcast, Helen. My version of that was in the early 2000s, I really desperately wanted to get into digital photography, but I didn't have the money for it.
01:17:47
Speaker
And I had a friend who was rather well-to-do, and he upgraded his digital SLR, and he gave me his old one, which was not really even out-of-date. He was just one of those people who had money to spend on the next great thing. And so he gave me a Nikon D70, which I have to this day. It's incredibly ancient by our current standards, but it's still a great camera.
01:18:13
Speaker
I was so in love with this thing, and one of the first photos I took was just this, I was walking home from grad school, and there was, the sun was setting behind this forest, and it was Norfolk Island pines, if you can picture those, and the sky was kind of this violet color, and the Norfolk Island pines have a very distinctive kind of shape, so they were silhouetted, and it was just this simple, really simple but beautiful image,
01:18:40
Speaker
And I looked at it on the little screen on the back of my camera, and it looked amazing. And I looked at it on my laptop, and it looked amazing. And I was so excited to print it. And I was totally new to digital photography, so I wasn't thinking about the color temperature and the way that my computer screen had different settings than my camera had different settings from the printer that I was going to use. So when I finally printed it, it looked totally different. It looked like crap.
01:19:08
Speaker
And I realized like, okay, if I'm really serious about this, I'm gonna have to get really into color temperature and RGB color spaces on the printer that I'm using. But at the end of the day, which I didn't do, that was sort of where I started to turn away from photography. But in the end, the photo that I took that got me so excited for digital photography was not what I saw.
01:19:36
Speaker
It was something like what I saw, but it was an exaggerated or hypersaturated version of what I saw. So there was already a disconnect between my experience and reality. And then when I printed it on a piece of filmic paper, there was yet a third thing that was not what I saw and that was not the image on my camera.
01:20:01
Speaker
And I think we want to think that those are small differences. But I think that when we're approaching photography the way that Bart is trying to approach it, those are not small differences. Those are hugely important.
01:20:15
Speaker
I'm not saying that all photographs are illusions that have no more representation or no more relation to the real world than anything else does. Of course they have more of a relation to the real world. Of course they can capture things more accurately or more quickly or with more quote-unquote honesty than certain other art forms can.
01:20:35
Speaker
I'm still not willing to go as far as you guys are and put that in its own category of thing. It still feels to me like it's a subcategory of a category that already existed, which is endlessly imperfect attempts to replicate sensory experience. He gets at that though, right? Because he talks about, even though he's playfully withholding the famous photo of his mother, which apparently actually
01:21:04
Speaker
The Pompey Dew might have had or might not have had like Jeffrey Bachchan, the Bart specialist was like doing research and they had an exhibit on Bart and they were not going to give him that photo. But they also didn't. They played a little cagey about whether it existed or not.
01:21:27
Speaker
Um, why did I bring this up? I brought this up because he says, right. And so at different points of the book, Brendan, um, no photo was good enough to really get at who my mother was, including the photo I'm withholding. And so not that that's like an easy, you know, kill shot here. Um, but just to say like, I think he made room for that, uh, even in his own text by saying like,
01:21:58
Speaker
The way I wish to really get at the experience that I know I've had of my mother, nothing will do that. A painting, a photo. I mean, I'm sure if he drew up a laundry list of other mediums by which to sort of fix or resurrect, so to speak, his mother, all of them would be inadequate to the real encounter.
01:22:24
Speaker
Well, he does say that. You're right. Although I felt like he was getting at the ability of a photograph, not necessarily to accurately like capture the physical details of what she looked like, but the ability of a photograph to capture the entirety of a person, basically the ability of a photograph to act as a stand in for his mother. Right. And you a minute ago, you brought up another thing that I think is worth tying into this, which is
01:22:56
Speaker
you pointed out that the actual physical photograph itself is going to decay, right? And that's true whether you're writing in 1980 in Bart's time and you're thinking of a printed photograph that's going to decay, or whether you're talking about digital photography today where eventually those files will become corrupted. It's all transient. It is all transient, like the permanence of photography is itself an illusion.
01:23:22
Speaker
nothing that we've ever photographed is going to last longer than any of us will. I mean, a little bit longer, but not really, not in the grand scheme of things. It's all going to fade away, it's all going to vanish. And yet we want to speak of it in these terms of permanence and the idea of the photograph as a
01:23:42
Speaker
A buffer against death or Barth talks about the idea of the denial of death, which is something we've actually talked about on this podcast before, right? The denial of death. I still see it as a subcategory of things that already existed. I don't know. I hear what you're saying.
01:23:59
Speaker
Let me, and then I want to let Helen jump in if Helen, you have things you want to bring up, but I just can't help but interject with one more thing here with the Buddhist piece, Brendan. So I don't think again that even with the
01:24:16
Speaker
even with the editing decisions that the translators made, to cut out some of the more explicitly Buddhist elements of Camera Lucida, there's enough in it that you still get a sense of, I think, why this is important to him. And let me try to get at this from a different angle to respond to your question, or to respond to your points.
01:24:40
Speaker
I've definitely had the experience of both looking at paintings and photos. So I'm going to come on your side now and say, I think art in general can do what I'm about to describe, which is
01:24:51
Speaker
I look at a photograph of an apple or a pear or a peach, like an extreme close-up, and it's showing me the fuzziness of the texture or the beads of perspiration on the skin of the fruit. And all of a sudden, that image, which is a representation of an actual pear or a plum,
01:25:14
Speaker
is helping me see a real pear or plum better than I'd ever seen it before. And it might actually invite me to, when I encounter a plum again, to look a little more closely. So I think art has this paradoxical ability to make something up, so to speak.
01:25:34
Speaker
You know, that's not actually the pair, it's an image of a pair, but actually the image of the pair helped me see the real pair better. You know, and I think that that is, it can be a profound experience. But to go further that with the Zen piece, the more you read Zen literature, and I'm far from an expert, but it doesn't take long to encounter these very un-Western, of course,
01:26:03
Speaker
explorations of death. And basically getting at on in so many words, death is not what you think it is. But the flip side of that coin is life is not necessarily what you think it is either. And so I just wonder if that is in here on some level, I don't think I'm projecting because Zen is central to this text, I think, and the way that Bart is exploring Zen. But
01:26:32
Speaker
even looking at a photo, which again, here I am saying it is a kind of living corpse on all these different levels. And it is on some level Bart reflecting on death, but I'm not even sure if we put that through a Zen filter that life or death is exactly what we think it is. And I wonder if he as well is inviting us to reflect on that.
01:27:02
Speaker
This is not what you think. And even the photo, it's not exactly what you think. Did you notice the punctum of this bandage on the hand of this person in an asylum staring out with someone next to them? I didn't catch that. It completely sort of transformed my way of relating to that photograph. And we could get into the complexities of when you add a caption, what that does to your interpretation. But I think more to the point,
01:27:30
Speaker
it helps you see a little bit differently and maybe even re-examine your presuppositions coming into the encounter. Helen, do you have anything you want to bring up with what Brendan has shared or what I've jabbered on about?
01:27:51
Speaker
Yeah, I have a lot of things, so it's hard to know where to start actually. The reason that I thought it was a good time for you to bring up Buddhism, because most of my first exposure to the concept of nothingness, which Brendan was talking about earlier, is not through Western philosophy, but through Buddhism.
01:28:14
Speaker
And it just made me think of how by the time you get around to mid-century philosophers in Europe, Buddhism is a big influence. I mean, it's an influence going back quite a ways, but they tend not to cite the influence. And so you start to get these tensions between you get something like being and nothing or
01:28:40
Speaker
you know, these words that are used together for a long time in Buddhist thought, and I'm no expert there. It's just, you know, by virtue of experience prior to studying philosophy. But I thought that that was—I agreed with you, Brandon, without saying that, you know, Western philosophy in my
01:29:02
Speaker
readings, it is always trying to nail it down, to articulate it, and it has fallen on the – tends to confront the kinds of contradictions that Buddhism lets stand by trying to reconcile them in some way. But it's only
01:29:21
Speaker
And it's only recently that there's been a little bit of a turn. So I wondered if, with Bart's text, if he wasn't trying to, because I have this thesis of the structure of the text where he's holding two things in tension, if he isn't trying to bring in Buddhism as a part of holding these two poles together in one instant.
01:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, so that was just a commentary on the Buddhism. But I have been curious, Brendan, why don't you think that he was successful? I don't think you've really said what makes him unsuccessful in his project here with this text. I think that I would be hard pressed to find a page of the book in which he didn't say something that I thought was profoundly incorrect.
01:30:18
Speaker
And that is not to say that I disagree with everything he says because I don't. I do think there are some interesting insights in here, and I did go back and spend a little bit more time with certain parts of the book after reading it the first time, especially after hearing or reading some of the positive things that the two of you had to say about it. But there's only so far you can make it in a text where you are disagreeing with things on every page before you're like, this is not working. We've talked a lot about the
01:30:48
Speaker
the punctum and the studium so far without mentioning what those are. I don't know that we need to do that. I don't know that we need to go around the table and everybody explain punctum and studium, but I think if we did, we might get three different definitions because Bart himself struggles to explain especially studium what the hell he's talking about. He's arbitrarily decided that based on his experience of looking at photographs,
01:31:17
Speaker
And he points out over and over again that he is not a photographer.
01:31:21
Speaker
Okay, let me back up before that. He makes no distinction whatsoever, no useful distinction between photography that is intended to provoke an aesthetic response, photography that is intended to be journalistic, photography that is intended to reinforce a memory, photography that is gonna be introduced into evidence in a criminal case, all the dozen, two dozen different ways that we intend to use photography and then practically use it, right? He just decides photography is a thing.
01:31:49
Speaker
All right. And then he arbitrarily decides, based on his subjective way of looking at photographs, that there are these two categories of things in a photograph. There's the studium, which is kind of like your contextual understanding of the factual stuff that's happening in the photograph. And then there's the punctum, which is sort of like this accidental detail that provokes some kind of much more visceral response in you. OK.
01:32:16
Speaker
But he doesn't use words that already exist in French. He reaches for Latin terms to do that. And then he struggles to explain what he means by the Latin terms. That to me is the mark of sloppy thinking and sloppy writing. And it doesn't excite me. It makes me feel like
01:32:39
Speaker
I'm reading something by someone who is too confident in their own intellect and does not have enough facts at their disposal.
01:32:48
Speaker
Let me just jump in and say, and this is not like a false humility, Helen, but you've also been more steeped in philosophy, and I would argue more trained in Western philosophy than either Brendan or myself. You've really gone at some very difficult texts and have been writing yourself quite a bit.
01:33:10
Speaker
Maybe I'm willing to concede, right? I don't want to put you in this boat, Brendan, but I'm willing to concede my lack of philosophical training is prohibiting me from
01:33:24
Speaker
penetrating the text to the degree that I would most wish to. But also on the flip side, and this is why I want to throw this your way, Helen, because I'm starting to build a bit of an argument that agrees with Brendan on one important piece, which is
01:33:40
Speaker
I think in terms of its stylistic execution, it is a little bit confused because I don't know what his other books are like, but they sound quite formal. This is somewhat informal. It's casual, but it's got a shit ton of heavy duty philosophy as well. And I think to straddle that line of informal sort of essayistic
01:34:06
Speaker
follow my nose writing with intense philosophical reinforcement is tough. And I wonder if Brendan's frustration is my own, which you helped me articulate, Brendan, which is a inconsistent execution in terms of its style, if that makes sense. It couldn't figure out what it wants to be.
01:34:33
Speaker
and therefore it reads in a kind of jagged way rather than a fluid way, which I would argue Berger does a better job with. He knows he's writing essays, and he's educated and thoughtful, but he's not a philosopher. He's a writer, he's more literary. Do you think there's any validity in that claim that maybe there is a bit of,
01:35:02
Speaker
rough around the edges, something that's a bit rough around the edges with this execution or a kind of stylistic inconsistency that creates mental constipation for the less initiated. You're asking me that question. Yeah. Yeah.
01:35:21
Speaker
I don't know. I guess I don't know where the stylistic inconsistency is coming from. And I would ask a question about what would be wrong about inconsistency or struggling with terms. Like if someone takes recourse to another language or to poetics, often it's a sign that they have reached the limit of what they're capable of expressing.
01:35:51
Speaker
And that's probably the most interesting part of any kind of philosophical work, is where expressibility fails. Those are my two thoughts on that. I'm not exactly sure where the stylistic inconsistency comes from. And let me- Or even if it exists, or even if it exists, I'm just throwing that out there.
01:36:10
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't see it. I mean, I thought the language was a little weird, but I was also aware that I was reading English as something that was written in French. So I kind of like put that aside because unless I can read the French, I can't be sure. You're going to see. Yeah, I just want to walk back one.
01:36:29
Speaker
one minor part of my rant, which is I didn't mean to criticize him for resorting to Latin. Whatever language we're using, it has limitations, and sometimes we need to pull words from other languages, and that's awesome. I don't know why I was being grumpy about it, except that
01:36:48
Speaker
It's sort of like, you know, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the only tool you have is a certain way of believing that everything in the world can be described through terminology borrowed from Latin, then you're going to feel like you're accomplishing something by doing that when you may in fact just be masking your ignorance.
01:37:14
Speaker
or alienating your audience to some degree, you know? But who is his audience here? That's an interesting question. Do you think he knows who his audience is? Good question.
01:37:29
Speaker
It's probably Iksantek. We could probably fairly say Iksantek. He was in dialogue with her. I feel like I'm getting close to raising some questions I had about some of the dressing on the structure of the text, but I did want to add that I am still not quite sure about the stylistic inconsistency, but I had the feeling that the reason, one reason why
01:37:59
Speaker
you know, at the center of the text, there is this shift to the, you know, the Palanod, where he needs to
01:38:10
Speaker
correct for something he's overstepped. And part of what I thought he overstepped when he was describing this studio, and Brendan, you were right, the studio is everything from your own history and cultural context that you bring to a photograph and you interpret it, including whether or not you can assess the technical prowess of the
01:38:33
Speaker
of the person who took the photograph or the age of the paper or even what paper it is or film, etc., or ways of reading art. But the punctum is this thing that is like using the Kantian word sublime. It's something that you kind of can't explain. It's not describable
01:38:54
Speaker
And yet, in that first part, I mean, if I elaborate a little bit more, it's not describable. It's perhaps not expressible. You can't explain the reason why. And yet, in that first part of the book, he goes to great lengths to describe it. And that's the overstepping.
01:39:14
Speaker
because it isn't the whole point of that kind of xtasis where he's suddenly experiencing all these different times at once and having this confrontation with finitude and the passing away of his mother but also love is not something that can be put into that kind of language, even Latin. And that's a hypothesis of what he needs to correct.
01:39:45
Speaker
There's a famous story. I say it's famous. I heard it, but then I never encountered it anywhere else. I don't know if it's true or not. It doesn't matter. I believe it was Hegel, that Hegel was giving a lecture in some European thought capital and
01:40:04
Speaker
as was the custom at the time, a newspaper was going to write up Hegel's lecture after the fact, and he was approached by a French, young French, eager French writer who said, can you rephrase what you just said briefly in French? And Hegel said, what I just said can be explained neither briefly nor in French, which- I love that. That's fucking good.
01:40:32
Speaker
on the one hand is the most badass thing to say ever, and on the other is perhaps an indication that you're a bit of a blowhard, right? So let me ask you this. My favorite photographer when I was in high school, when I was really, really into photography, photography was Ansel Adams, right? Almost exclusively a landscape photographer.
01:41:00
Speaker
actually quite a good portraitist, but that's not what he's remembered for. Is there anything whatsoever in Bart's book that says a single thing about the experience that I had being awed and delighted and fascinated by Ansel Adams' photographs?
01:41:21
Speaker
And why would he need to? Well, because he's trying to explain. He tells us on the first page that he's going to create an ontology of photography.
01:41:33
Speaker
So if the most profound interactions that I've ever had with photographs, that had nothing to do with people, nothing to do with corpses of anybody's younger selves, nothing to do with a punkdom. As far as I know, I was not struck by either way. I would disagree. I would disagree with
Debating Barthes' Theories and Interpretations
01:41:50
Speaker
that. I think you, I think we could make the argument that you were experiencing a punkdom or punkdoms when you responded to the Ansel Adams photographs that you responded to.
01:42:03
Speaker
Maybe my problem is I just think that's a silly word. I can't take it seriously when anybody actually says that word out loud. See, that's why I was not that. I was like, oh, I don't, you know, like, I'm not really going to get that much out of this book is because I didn't really, you know, the, the idea of the studio and the punk them, at least when I had read it, maybe a dozen years ago, I mean, it was novel to me and I liked the, I liked the comp, the
01:42:27
Speaker
complementariness of these terms together again is maybe one of the first theoretical texts I had been reading. But that over time just seems really overplayed and simplistic and that's part of my surprise at reading the text and then seeing its structure. I was really delighted by that and all of these references to other
01:42:51
Speaker
concepts like adventure and the apology that's part of the structure of the text. I mean, I find that exciting. I would say with your question is that it might be that if he's talking about the presence of the photograph, it's not like
01:43:16
Speaker
I don't think that it has to necessarily resonate with all of your experiences. Well, I mean, if you're right about the fact that this really isn't about photography, that it's an adventure and that it's about grief, and mostly I agree with you about that, then you're right. And you were going to ask a minute ago in reference to what Robert said, like, well, what would be the problem with stylistic inconsistency?
01:43:46
Speaker
And my answer to that would kind of be the same as what I was about to say about what we're talking about now, which is there's nothing wrong with stylistic inconsistency. And there's also nothing wrong with the fact that Bart maybe thinks he's writing about photography and then realizes that he's actually writing about something else. Many of the best things to read are things where the author is discovering as they're writing.
01:44:12
Speaker
what they're actually interested in. That's what usually makes some of the best essays, that poetic association that then takes this incredible literary form in the hands of a great writer.
01:44:24
Speaker
But I think Bart is just kind of confused. And I think that what he thinks he's doing and what he's actually doing are different things in a way that is problematical rather than the secret strength of the thing that he's created. But that's also a subjective opinion on my end. Yeah, and maybe that's come up a couple of times. What gives you the impression that he's confused? His words.
01:44:55
Speaker
I mean, you have an example. I hope we didn't put you on the spot there. Pick a sentence at random, man. Just pick a sentence at random.
01:45:04
Speaker
Well, I did have some actually singled out earlier, but now I've probably lost them because I've been jumping around trying to find different things. I don't even know where to start. I'm looking right now at the photo that he includes, which is a Ken Vessing photo just in this book at least titled Nicaragua 1979. It's on page 22. It's a couple of nuns.
01:45:28
Speaker
and then some soldiers and that obviously it's the juxtaposition of the nuns and the soldiers in a war-torn country that is in some way essential to the essence of the photograph. And he talks about how this photo made him pause. He says it's he talks about the banality of rebellion
01:45:49
Speaker
He says he's not interested or pleased or intrigued by the photo, but he understands that its adventure derives from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, the soldiers and the nuns. And all of that
01:46:09
Speaker
is, I think, rife for exploration. But then all he says after he's established this is that, I foresaw a structural rule conforming to my own observation, and I immediately tried to verify it by inspecting other photographs by the same reporter. Wait, what? The one thing doesn't follow from the other thing at all. At all.
01:46:39
Speaker
Like, you're not, first of all, you need to look at this photograph as a photograph. Then you need to figure out what you think about whether the juxtaposition of the nuns and the soldiers, to what extent was it deliberate, to what extent was it accidental, to what extent was it highlighted by the photographer, to what extent is that then juxtaposed against the background, which is clearly this war-torn, impoverished landscape. And then you need to consider journalistic intent versus artistic intent.
01:47:08
Speaker
and that would just be like stuff you would have to do to get to a basic point I think before you could even put the photograph in the kind of category that he wants to be able to put it in. To me it reads like someone who has thoughts
01:47:24
Speaker
and is mistaking the significance of their thoughts. That's all it is. Like, oh, I saw this photo and I thought this thing about it. And I was like, let me go look at another photo by the same guy and see if the same thing applies. It's like he's trying to do philosophy, but he's failing at it and he's trying to do science at the same time, but he's also failing at that. Off the top of my head, that's the best way I can say it.
01:47:46
Speaker
I'll jump in with like one other one and I could see it cutting both ways because I am like your point, Helen, about what was the actual term for the second half of a book sort of undoing the first? The palanod. It's the apology. So I love George Parek.
01:48:07
Speaker
And Parek loved this stuff. So like he has a book that's essentially about as close as anyone, any reader of his will get to him working through his own experiences of the Nazi Holocaust. Cause his mother was killed in Auschwitz. He was hidden, I think in a Swiss school and his father died in, um, I might've been world war one, but he was orphaned as a kid.
01:48:35
Speaker
And I loved what he does there. I love these kinds of, when it's in the hands of masters, those sorts of techniques that are not just for their own sake, but they're intentional and they're actually driving at something. I loved what he did with W, Memory of Childhood, which again, W is the letter.
01:48:58
Speaker
was very intentional because if you fold the first V and the W onto the one on the right-hand side, it vanishes into that V.
01:49:09
Speaker
So I guess I bring that up to say, well, I bring it up because I like excuses to bring up George Parekh, but that I like these kinds of literary games, if you want to call it that, or techniques. And I'm open to the possibility that what I'm about to critique is actually a technique rather than slippage, right? So
01:49:32
Speaker
He includes this photo, Brendan, of A. Philip Randolph, who I don't know much about, but he was clearly a very prominent labor leader. And his description of the photograph, this is to you, Helen, he writes, perhaps the heir is ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face
01:49:55
Speaker
the reflection of a life value. Avadon has photographed the leader of the American labor party, Philip Randolph. This is the big piece where I'm like, wait a second. He goes, who has just died as I write these lines in the photograph, I read an air of goodness. And then in a parenthetical, he writes, no impulse of power that is certain. And I looked at this photo and went, how is that so fucking certain Bart?
01:50:24
Speaker
Unless, right? Unless he's tipping his hat to the fact that he has just performed a punctum on the image. And in his own radical subjectivity, he's reading a no impulse of power in this portrait. But it does seem a little presumptuous, if it's not that, to feel like he's got these sort of final says
01:50:48
Speaker
That's not a word. Has the final say on what's inside of this person's head as their portrait was taken and what that means about their character in some sort of conclusive way. That's a stretch to me unless he's playing at something.
01:51:05
Speaker
Yeah, so this is the part where I think that we agree on this particular point, although in my mind, I didn't think of it as a stylistic inconsistency. I've been seeing it as like he's got this really beautiful rhetorical structure, but his details are deeply flawed. And that's sort of my biggest beef with the text, is that why these limited
01:51:35
Speaker
photographers, widely reading into these images about these people. And I went around with a lot of questions, especially the photograph, if we take the photograph from Nicaragua, is that
01:51:51
Speaker
at the time he's writing this, is this really novel, this kind of juxtaposition of the nuns and the soldiers? I feel like I'm so tired of that kind of easy irony that it's not relevant anymore. So I'm like trying to play, I mean, wait a minute, you know, he's writing in 1980. This is, the book reads, like it was written in like 1930 or something. I know, I know.
01:52:20
Speaker
And I had to keep reminding myself, like, this is 1980. So, you know, he has available to him many more photographers.
01:52:32
Speaker
then he selects and I'm like, okay, I'm trying to be generous. Maybe he's just drawing from what he's seen recently. I even Googled contemporary photographic art exhibitions, 1980, to see if I could pull up what he might have engaged with besides
01:52:50
Speaker
what he saw in the newspaper or what he exchanged with Sontag. I had read elsewhere that he has written on photography and prior to this text and also that he like referenced different photographs. So this seemed intentional, but it remains a mystery. And I, you know, I'm like searching around in my mind. Is he selecting certain photographs that
01:53:15
Speaker
demonstrate a certain kind of historical aspect that he has called out, that he doesn't want to show something contemporary because we might mistake it as still living. But then he has maplethorpe. So if that's the kind of stylistic inconsistency you're talking about, that makes sense to me. That's the bummer. It just needs a better... You could
01:53:45
Speaker
you make the same structure or make the same argument, but you could fill it with better details that would make it stronger. And yeah, that was a pain in the ass, that part. And what you mentioned, Robert, about reading in, I mean, how can he make that claim about that man? And while we're on it,
01:54:12
Speaker
why is it that the photographs that he shows of people of color are too associated with slavery from a particular point of view? And so people are absolutely right to pick that apart. That's the annoying part of a French guy from a certain era that we have to sit through this particular French vantage.
01:54:43
Speaker
That was just my rant. I totally agree with you. One of the photos of a black man is an Avedon photo of a man who was born a slave. Bart uses that to talk about how when he was a kid, he encountered a photograph of a slave market.
01:55:07
Speaker
And it really shook him, which I can totally understand why that would be. But he didn't have the photo anymore. He didn't know what happened to it, but it remained with him. And my only response to that, if we're on the subject of white people trying to learn about the traumas perpetrated on black people through images, is I had the same reaction to an illustration of a certain aspect of the middle passage when I was in high school. And what I was responding to was an illustration, not a photograph.
01:55:38
Speaker
And I'm not saying that there's no power in a photograph of a slave market, of course there is. That would be a ridiculous thing to argue.
01:55:46
Speaker
I would be very surprised if he was moved any more deeply than I was by the illustration that I looked at. Like some of this is just how much work are you willing to let your imagination do or not do? But again, that's me coming back to the idea that photography is a subcategory. So we've been going for two hours and 10 minutes. I would say we've probably only got 10 minutes of stuff in here that is not usable. Like this has been a consistently high level conversation.
01:56:16
Speaker
So this is going to be a long episode. I say all that by way of saying we should probably work our way towards a conclusion. Let me just cut in then with my final point that I'm passionate about on this particular theme that we're exploring. My note to myself after I read
01:56:39
Speaker
Bart, which I think we're all agreeing editorializing what's inside of the head of the portrait at that point in the book, was
Self-Reflection Through Barthes' Lens
01:56:50
Speaker
this. This is what I wrote. Has Bart read the image or has the image read Bart?
01:56:58
Speaker
And what I mean by that is Jeffrey Bachchan in his introduction to photography degree zero, where he brings all these Bart experts or photography experts to write about camera Lucida, he even concedes like this definitely has, and I think he more or less says it from his own angle, a kind of narcissism and, um,
01:57:26
Speaker
I wonder if the thing you were, I don't want to put words in your mouth, Brendan, but sort of like as we're working through this, where I'm now landing, like in terms of clarifying and being able to put language to what my critique of this book is, is that he winds up, I think, unfortunately, at times lapsing into a kind of navel gazing about himself. And it becomes more about
01:57:51
Speaker
Bart than it is about reflections on photography, which is fine on some level. We know that there are specifics. He's grieving his mother and he's working through that specific grief to make maybe more general philosophical claims about this medium. But I do think it gets more problematic than that because the editorializing itself
01:58:15
Speaker
I think works against him and winds up, what's the word, not corrupting or compromising, but just diminishing, I think, the power of some of his arguments because he gets a little too wrapped up in his own head and makes these pronouncements that I think are nothing other than, if we're being honest, editorializing. And that's not, I understand,
01:58:44
Speaker
He's not writing a scientific treaties, right? But he is trying to present his arguments logically and with a certain kind of evidence. And when he gets into these sorts of statements like I just brought up, like this person has no impulse of power, on what basis do you make this claim? Other than this is what you think, thoughts from Roland Barthes. But that's far from philosophy in my mind. And I think that that,
01:59:13
Speaker
It does ultimately, I think, diminish certain aspects of the book and maybe even weakens it. I mean, more fundamentally, it weakens the power of what makes in other moments this text so rich and evocative. It gives me the same feeling I have when
01:59:38
Speaker
I find out that, you know, or I come across like someone's like a writer, an artist or somebody whose work is, is just like shines in this, this kind of complete, self complete way. And then you, you know, they're like on Instagram or they're,
01:59:54
Speaker
tweeting and you find out that they're just like that they have all these thoughts or like they're just you know, you're confronted with the with the With the person and then it just it diminishes the feeling about the work. They do Do you ever have that am I the other one? Definitely. I I live in an ontological silo. I don't engage with social media Do we want to shit
02:00:24
Speaker
I'm okay sometimes with when I edit these with a kind of abrupt ending like Robert and I are just kind of talking and then one of us makes a joke and then I just kind of like fade in the ultra music like I can end on that or if either one of you wants to try to like wrap things up I don't feel like I have it well I do want to say
02:00:47
Speaker
I do want to say again, thank you to Helen and plug your pockets. Thank you, Helen. Before I do that, do you want to get in any other final thoughts? I mean, I do. I have two, but I don't want to- Do it, do it, do it. Pick them up. One is, I'll tell you what they are and we can decide if we pick them. One is, la jete. Did that come up for either of you reading this text?
02:01:12
Speaker
No, it's interesting because Robert and I actually talked about La Jette not that long ago, but I don't think it came up for me reading this. It didn't, Helen, but when you wrote it in your piece, that made total sense. I mean, to me, I was like, La Jette is what, like 1962? I might be a little wrong. He's friends with Chris Marker. He's obviously in his
02:01:39
Speaker
repertoire and it doesn't even, it doesn't, it doesn't factor in. But, you know, it's like the Le Jette is almost like the negative, negative, like the film negative of what Barthes is describing. You know, here it is, it's all these, you know, the punctum ends up being something like the moment when the woman's, woman's eyes move.
02:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's really, it's crazy. It's just out there. And I just wanted to remark that I thought that that was just part of that whole package of like, why did he select the photographs he did? Why, you know, there's already sort of something out there in this little movie, La Gente, that grapples with this image and past. And I mean, it's all about a time traveler, a man who watches his own death.
02:02:30
Speaker
And that's not the punctum for him. The punctum is the woman. And she's the woman he saw. So time is already all messed up. He's having this ecstatic experience of multiple times. So it feels like, is Barth just sort of repeating or writing a version of la jete? That's a question.
02:02:53
Speaker
And the last thing I wanted to bring up was a real question for you, not just a question to end on. But does this book carry forward for us in the world of photography that we live in now? And I don't have a resolution. I'm so aware that photography has become
02:03:22
Speaker
not it's not most photographs are not taken by humans i think la chate is infinitely more thought-provoking than bart is so i'm glad you brought up that connection because i and now that you say it like of course um
02:03:40
Speaker
And I don't know how I miss that, but I think that Marker in La Jette, what is that? That film's like, how many minutes long?
Photography's Unique Emotional Power
02:03:49
Speaker
Does it even pass the 20 minute mark? I think just barely. Less than 30, 20. Yeah, I think accomplishes far more than Bart does in his book. And I also found myself, Helen, wondering about the modern world of photography. Because I think he kind of got it wrong about his own era,
02:04:10
Speaker
I wasn't particularly vexed about the fact that I didn't think it applied to the modern era, but there is a lot that has changed that I think would probably make this even harder to apply to the world than it was in 1980, and you're right, it does read like it was written in 1930.
02:04:30
Speaker
Just to then, I know I said I had my final thought, but I have a final, final thought. I might even have a final, final, final thought. I have a tendency to do this. But Satori, enlightenment, the one term that he uses, because I brought in Mano No Aware, which isn't even in there. So let me just linger on Satori with this Lajate piece for a moment, because, Helen, I thought the fluttering of the eyes, the ecstatic moment, arguably the punctum of that film,
02:05:00
Speaker
Like what is actually happening there, even if we can't define punctum or even if we struggle understandably to put words to those experiences when we encounter them in art or in anything really. But I thought that Benjamin in his own way, and I want to be careful, right? Cause at the end of his work of art essay, which Brendan and I have read and we liked certain parts of it. I know Brendan, you didn't love all of it, but the final line, Helen is,
02:05:29
Speaker
that fascism aestheticizes politics and communism politicizes art. And so I want to be careful because I think you can wind up in a sort of fascistic aestheticization on accident when you talk in certain ways. And so because I think of like an Arnold Toynbee, who was a British historian who talked about like,
02:05:51
Speaker
The only encounters with history that count are those at the top of the mountain, bird's eye view, looking down, sort of having this ecstatic mystical experience. And he's a Nazi. He was sympathetic to the Nazis. So I'm suspicious of some of that stuff. But I think Benjamin gets at it from another angle where he is kind of saying, when you have that encounter with a photograph,
02:06:15
Speaker
like an ecstatic encounter or what he might call in English translation dialectics at a standstill. I was going to ask you about that. Like the immediacy of that experience that it is a kind of short circuiting in the positive sense of
02:06:31
Speaker
getting around all this intellectual crap and just having a fucking authentic encounter that just hits you right in the gut. And I have to say there's only been maybe like a half dozen experiences that I've had of that through text if I'm reading a history book.
02:06:50
Speaker
There's been thousands through photographs and you don't need a college degree to have that encounter. And so again, like I'm not trying to make an anti-intellectual argument of photography being superior to text, but I am saying that it does something that text maybe can't and it does activate things. It lights up constellations inside us in ways that are absolutely unique and unmistakable.
02:07:20
Speaker
And for that reason, I think we'll never be over whatever it is that draws us to photographs. It seems, though, that it doesn't need to actually be a photograph. I like hearing what you said about dialectics at a standstill, because that's what I mean. I use this word ecstasy to like where time collapses, where you don't have the distance from the thing anymore. You're like in it.
02:07:46
Speaker
in immediacy. So I think we're trying to circle around the same thing here that's difficult. If I think about the book living on, it is just that those moments are possible for people. Photography may be more so than a text.
02:08:07
Speaker
I would agree with that, but I don't think it's limited to photography. It can be something experienced without the mediation of an image. I know that he says that you can't with film, and I don't know if I agree with that or not.
Conclusion and Podcast Promotion
02:08:26
Speaker
Well, thank you, everybody, so much for listening. And Helen, thank you so much for being here. This has been incredible. Helen's podcast is a minimal event. And if you've stuck with us this far, or even if you haven't, you should go check that out. It is, I believe, available in most places. Podcasts are found. Thank you for inviting me. It was so fun to talk about this book with the two of you. Thank you for joining us. Talking about it was so much more fun than reading it.
02:08:59
Speaker
This one is like memories of clothes you can't see
02:09:44
Speaker
you