Camera Lucida (lecture & notes)

Just came back from a very insightful lecture about Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, a book I've glanced over but never really fully understood the concepts of semiotics within photography and I've only used the text with reference to film work. However the lecture explained the terms Barthes derives and his ever changing meanings of words used in the description of analysing photography, as the lecture focused on photography my notes are my ideas of film and how I could use Barthes ideas and created visual narratives in films.

History:

social codes, autobiographical response, limitations of semiotic understanding of images (moving images), work of mourning, myth: meaning an elusion to be exposed, signifier/signified, learn to read images (photographs or film stills, or even moving image)

Saussure - structuralism (meaning does not come from us, it comes from structures of society)

Sign - signifier sensory aspect (see/hear/experience)

Signified - meaning of the signifier

eg. Red: Signifier, Stop: Signified

Meaning cannot simply be the expression of an individual (Structuralism)

Photograph: speech

Barthes: meaning personally produced, link to reality, myth propaganda

Meaning produced culturally

Photograph literal reality, 'Critique of the Image', Private Significance, Deconstruct - Structuralism, Stills from film

Obvious Meaning

Obtuse Meaning

The Third Meaning

-information level

-symbolic level

Semiotic meaning: Obvious Meaning

Obtuse meaning: Most interesting - can't locate products of a structural meaning

'What in the image, is purely image..'p61

Significance, Emotion, the obtuse meaning is outside, cannot be described

Studium - I perceive quite familiar consequence of my knowledge and culture

Punctum - comprehensible objects, the social, cultural meaning

Studium - unconcerned desire, liking not loving, encounter photographers intentions, contract between creators and consumers (semiotic meaning)

Punctum - PUNCTURE Studium, accident, 'pricks me', not something intended accident, idiosyncratic moment between viewer and photograph

Studium: coded

Punctum: not, what I can name can't prick me, 'wound', area desire & love, give examples betray secret, start analysing -betraying something about yourself

Photograph: represents something that has been interrupts flow of time, death: what was presence and absence

Punctum may only be revealed when looking back on it, self exploration, understands something about yourself

Punctum acts as a stimulus to fantasy, (punctum: added, stimulus: narration - Readers story told)

- pursuit of punctum pursuit of OWN self knowledge

Weisberg 'like a fetish, this element express and stands for the viewers desire'

Punctum: male fetish object phallic

Ultimate fantasy

- need to function of public meaning