TEXT Journal: Essaying the picture

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2002

Since the advent of photography the phenomenon of the image has redefined the human experience, both taking us deeper into, and further away from ourselves, blurring the lines between subject and object. The work of these six talented emerging artists calls the image back into question, both stretching and problematizing its definition. Implicit in this action, is challenging the link between the image and how we see/know our human selves.

Writing the image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean Michele Rabate, 1995

2013

This research project considers the photograph as a common space, a space of encounter that unsettles the relations between word and image. It calls for a thinking of the photograph alongside notions of commonality at a time of increasing fragmentation and alienation in terms of what is communicable. The project is driven by different forms of description as a methodology and mode of enquiry. These methods of description constitute a series of experiments in writing and photography. They are presented in the thesis as image and text works and accompanying the thesis as an installation of photographic works and composition of voice recordings. The context of the research engages practices of space and everyday life along side ideas about community and commonality. Methods of description draw out the relationship between word and image, examining different particularities between writing as image and the construction of photographic sequences as a visual syntax in order to question the limits of description in relation to the photographic image and human encounter. The process of research is framed within a series of ongoing conversations that embed themselves within thinking about and making photographs. Sitting on park benches and considering the space of The Look and the work Jean-Paul Sartre, converses with a series of photographs and writings that describe a space of human encounter. The description of Charles Bovary's Hat in the opening sequence of Madame Bovary 1 by Gustave Flaubert, informs a descriptive method and thinking about the photograph as a kind of mute or stuttering face. A dialogue with Walker Evan's Labor Anonymous photographs emerges through experimental forms of writing and cropping. This concludes in a series of 150 sentences and photographic fragments that cover the entirety of the photographs in the Labor Anonymous archive, replacing editing with a process of cropping in order to approach an anonymous space within the photographic image. The thesis ends with photographs of discarded piles of organic matter constructed through a rigorous method of writing drawn out of the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and a reading of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponges. Here the photograph is presented as an exhausted site where word and image exist alongside each other, radically passive, together-apart. Making a series of voice recordings enables an exploration of the incommensurability of word and image approaching problems surrounding a thinking of the face, and the face-to-face encounter through the photograph. Throughout the project a problem of pronouns is evoked, an uncomfortable sense of the relations between us all in looking and thinking about the space of the image and how it can be constituted and conveyed. Processes of description developed through the different forms of enquiry call us to the urgent task of considering the photographic image as a site of commonality and a space of community.

2020

Birkbeck University of London - History of Art Department Postgraduate Summer Conference Dialogues Friday 24th June 2022, 1:00-5:30pm Keynes Library, 2022

As Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder wrote in their introductory essay to the volume Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, "the 'meaning' and 'fact' of photographic images, are not simply found within the photographic material but in a set of relationships formed between the creator, the user, the object and the archive". Photographic archives – the ones this presentation will consider – can offer numerous kinds of discourse to be written. Analyzing their pictures means tackling not only the singularity of manufacts, but the complexity and the multilayered life of the visual objects, giving the viewer the possibility of re-narrating voices of the past and establishing a relationship between these silent materials and the users. However, this latter is not the only dialogue a collection of photographic prints can trigger. More profoundly, pictures can whisper, suggest, and help in retracing more clearly the path or the creative intentions of artists, their practices, and experimentations. In parallel, they can also provide information on the professional, social, and affective networks, revealing a much broader scene of their lives as well as the historical context in which they are operating. In other words, when put together, these objects transcend their documental nature, and the unexpressed language of photographs can become the byword of a lively debate revolving around photography. By assembling a selection of prints, this presentation aims at sharing the unpublished archive of Gustavo Bonaventura (1882-1966), an Italian photographer active in Rome in the first half of the Twentieth century. His production will show how the archive can be considered a generator of dialogues produced through images. The reading of some pictures will reveal more about Bonaventura's specialization in soft-focus portraits; his collaboration with Futurism and avant-gardes; the blurred boundaries between Pictorialism and Modernism; his connections with international artists - such as Rudolf Dührkoop, Auguste Rodin and Gustave Klimt; the shaping of a visual fashion for the high society and a more general debate on the creation of pictures.

Medien & Zeit, 1994

Ever since their invention, photographic images have often been thought to be a special kind of image. Often, photography has been claimed to be a particularly realistic medium. At other times, photographs are said to be epistemically superior to other types of image. Yet another way in which photographs apparently are special is that our subjective experience of looking at photographs seems very different from our experience of looking at other types of image, such as paintings and drawings. While the other seemingly distinctive aspects of photography have been quite thoroughly discussed in the literature, theories of the experience of photography, or in other words, theories of its special phenomenology, are less common. To be sure, the phenomenon has often been pointed out and described, but explanations of the phenomenology of photography are rare. In this paper, I attempt an explanation of at least part of the phenomenology of photography by appealing to the idea, borrowed from André Bazin, that a photograph is a certain kind of trace. Along the way, it is also argued that Kendall Walton's so called “transparency thesis” cannot give a plausible explanation of the phenomenology associated with looking at photographs.