Please post here if you attended either the Geoffrey Batchen talk at Bekeley on Camera Lucida, or the Pierre Huyghe talk in San Francisco on Monday night. Try to give us the general topic, recount the major argument or point you took away, tell us what if any images or examples were used, and let us know what you thought about it all. It would be especially helpful if you could say something about how you think the talk might be relevant to the themes that are emerging in the course.
(to the left is an image of an artwork Pierre Huyghe spoke about in his lecture at CCA)
16 comments:
Geoffrey Batchen: “Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography”
Batchen’s talk is on Roland Barthe’s autobiographical novel Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography. Although this book dates back to over 25 years ago, it is still one of the most powerful texts in the field of photography. Batchen’s general topic is about what the book has to offer and the reasons behind its popularity. He goes on to argue that the novel is not a typical history book and is about photography rather than a history of photos. He uses many examples including Karl Dauthendey, Dan Boudinet, and R. Avedon to display his point that photography has a contiguous relationship with the past. Each photograph shows of what is present, reminds us of what is in the past, and speaks about the catastrophe of death in the future. Hence, in one frame a photograph can capture a moment and contain clues to the past and future. One interest point in the talk was about the title of the novel. Batchen points out that a Camera Lucida is used as an inward-looking apparatus. It is used, however, as a title of a novel about photography—an apparatus for looking out onto the world around us. This is an interesting contrast that serves as the start for an inspirational and memorable novel. I had questions about what he called a binary in photography and how he connected that to politics, specifically Bush’s government and its division of things into good and evil. Overall, the talk was interesting but at times very complex.
Geoffrey Batchen’s talk was a reading of his recent paper about Roland Barthes’ 1980 book, Camera Lucida. Camera Lucida is regarded by some as the best history of photography ever written and by others as only an amateur’s narrow viewpoint. In either case, it is unique from any other history of the same subject in form and content. Barthes arranges the photos not in chronological order, by subject, or by photographer; instead they seem to be a merely personal selection of his favorites. Despite a complete break from the traditional rigid organization of history texts and its relatively short length, Camera Lucida coherently presents the history of photography from birth to death—according to Batchen, Barthes believed himself to be one of the last in the original tradition of photography.
In the same vein, Barthes saw photos as “modes of apprehension”: things simultaneously in the present and future. In the text, he plays with life and death (that is, present and future), the discussion of which is somewhat centered around his late mother and in particular, a certain photograph of her. Interestingly, he writes that he will never reproduce the photograph, somewhat paradoxically only describing a picture with words in a book about photography. In essence, Camera Lucida is a triple exemplification of temporality using Barthes’ mother, photography as an art form, and the individual photos themselves as examples. It amazingly manages to be both an important historical account of photography and an emotional, personal, story about life and death.
Batchen had a slideshow to accompany his talk. He showed 10-15 pictures from Camera Lucida as he talked about them as well as several images of other histories of photography.
Despite being a little confused at the beginning, I enjoyed the talk quite a bit. Batchen made solid arguments about Camera Lucida and was clear enough for people who had never read the book to understand and appreciate. He even managed to briefly relate Barthes’ good/evil pairing to the war in Iraq.
Clearly the subject of photography is relevant to this class, as is Barthes’ ideas about a concurrent present and future. Perhaps less obviously appropriate is the mixing of photography and storytelling in Camera Lucia.
Jamal Hunt
The talk by Geoffrey Batchen seemed to be on an interesting book but delivered in a monotonous tone as he seemed to just read off his paper. But getting beyond his presentation, he did have some insight to Camera Lucida, a book that I have never heard of but apparently is very important in the world of photography.
One of the first things he mentioned that caught my attention was the fact that the book was written in the first person. I think it was very daring of him to write in the first person, since I have found that people don’t accept it. He also mentioned that an amateur can give a point of view that an expert cannot, and I couldn’t agree more. For example, from hearing the different opinions about the painting in today’s class, it seemed that those who were informed about the painting’s context and subject had different views than those with no background on the painting. This was especially true in regards to how to interpret the woman’s face as she beheaded the man.
Batchen also mentioned that Barthes put separate images side by side, such as a politician and an assassin, which is an interesting twist to Lessing’s idea of images being side by side. Lessing did not seem to talk about how a series of images, when placed side by side, can alter their meanings as they interact with each other’s separate representations.
I thought it was also interesting of Barthes to talk about different mediums in which photos can be represented. There was a photo Batchen showed which required a black backing and would allow for the image to be shown; otherwise, it would appear as a negative. Another was an image that needed to be tilted, and Batchen said that you had to suppress your reflection (from the device) out of your mind. The medium in which you place a work of art can alter interpretation and even a series of actions, which Lessing claims is what only poetry can do. With the invention of 2D holograms and film, I believe this is no longer true.
Tonight’s talk by Batchen was definitely unclear as to what its intention was, especially when he side tracked to what seemed to be his own political opinions on war, but it was worth while in hearing a refreshing side of photography from Camera Lucida.
Christina Norbygaard
Pierre Huyghe talk at CCA
Huyghe showed slides of work he made over about the last ten years and talked about what inspired each piece, how it was installed, what he was attempting to achieve with each project. At the end of his talk he showed two short films: one documenting his project on the French actress who was voice of Snow White, and one of his project on a Le Corbusier building at Harvard, which culminated in a puppet show.
The talk was very relevant to our class; I wish you all could have been there. (But it was packed!) But Huyghe’s experiments with time took so many forms it is difficult to reduce them to one theme. He made a frame-by-frame remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a low-budget shot-by-shot repetition of the film. He also started the “Association of Artists for Freed Time,” a group of artists who promoted ways of disrupting time as it is organized by work and government and routine. He did a show in a museum in Austria documenting an imagined journey to Antartica, then three years later he actually took the journey, as if going back in time to make the exhibition real. He made a documentary about the real story on which the film Dog Day Afternoon is based, in which the narrator’s memory of what really happened to him is obviously distorted by what happened in the Hollywood film made about his story. One piece I really liked was not really a ‘piece’ at all: Huyghe was invited to museum where many famous artists in the past had painted directly on the walls--the walls had been repainted white over and over, covering all these layers from past exhibitions. He took a floor sanding machine and ‘polished’ through the paint on the wall to expose the layers. He basically just made a shallow hole in the wall but because the sander went deeper in the center, it looks like the cross section of a tree, where different colored rings of paint reveal a history of the place.
Huyghe was very interested in time and ‘timing.’ He said he’d like to make an artwork that was not at all about what it was, but about when it was; not what he showed but when it was shown. He talked a lot about the idea of an exhibition as making something appear, as putting something under light or exposing it for moment, making it happen. He understood the artwork as a kind of performance or experiment with a given format; a way of drawing out what he called ‘an element of fiction’ that is potential within any reality, situation, or set of rules. He was interested in thinking about how the rules, scripts, or programs for any art format could be looped or doubled, which confuses the fiction and the reality. For example, he took a photograph, with staged actors, of workmen at a real worksite. Then he posted this photo on a huge billboard at the actual worksite he had photographed. Although the billboard format is usually used for ‘unreal’ advertising images, in this situation the photograph looked documentary and the real workers working at the site where the billboard was installed seemed, to passersby, like actors in some staged exhibition. One of the ideas I liked best from his talk was a strange formula he offered for thinking about the artwork as a ‘becoming-image’ of time; he said the perfect image of time, the artwork of perfect timing, would be like time to the power of time, time squared. A mind-blowing idea…
Geoffrey Batchen: “Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography”
This talk was given by Professor Geoffrey Batchen who teaches at the Graduate Center of City College of New York. His speech was based on an influential book, Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. Overall, I found this talk was a bit difficult to comprehend as I haven’t read this book nor have I had any background in the subject of literary photography. However, I was able to summarize few major comments that Professor Batchen made regarding this book. Camera Lucida along with Susan Sontag’s On Photography has been the most important books on photography for the last twenty-five years. Batchen argued that in addition to being a book about reflections on photography, Barthes approached his work not as a photographer but as a spectator. Barthes showed many human elements through the pictures represented in the book. The emotional element was further emphasized through the concept of duality. Professor Batchen depicted many pictures, both from the book and elsewhere, that utilized the simple concept of dualism to invoke emotions from the audience. Professor Batchen also pointed out that Barthes selected these pictures very carefully, and they are by no means a comprehensive selection of all pictures. However, Barthes’ selection represented his vision during the inception of this book, as he believed that history is simply a mode of reality.
Cathy Hwang
“Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography”: Geoffrey Batchen
This presentation began with an array of questions concerned with what contributes to the history of photography. And more generally, what is photography? Is it the capacity for reproduction? Or the combination of time and space? Furthermore, how can you separate the photo from what it represents? This immediately reminded me of Foucault and his theory that the word and the picture have come to mean more than the actual three-dimensional object itself. Following the introduction Batchen discussed a “need for systematic transformation of the history of photography.” This need, according to Batchen is satisfied by Roland Barthes book Camera Lucida which he calls “THE history of photography”. The book is composed of two sections with 24 parts and is filled with references to duality—the first half is a mirror image of the second, in order to show that “politics are always at play”. Despite this books commendation, one major fault is the lack of reference to German theorist Walter Benjamin, who discussed the idea of “aura” later stolen by Barthes. According to Benjamin, aura is one of the most valuable commodities an object has, yet reproduction detracts from it and eventually all of its originality will have been lost.
There are 24 black and white photos and 1 color Polaroid ranging from the 1820’s to the 1970’s. Although dated by the pictures, this book is considered timeless for many reasons; it is a first person account presenting the author not as an authority, but rather a speculator. It is seemingly a biased opinion of the history of photography but remains in high esteem because power has been retracted from the authoritative author due to the belief that “the amateur is special because he/she has insight the professional does not.”
According to Batchen, this book opens up the question of the whole photographic experience. First because it photography creates a spatial connection between the represented object and the memory of the people who experienced it. Secondly, it describes the order of a new science. The title itself makes reference to a tool used prior to the camera—the camera lucida. This tool was created with the idea of internal vision, creating a focal point for the monocular view making a captured image intimate. And in conclusion, Batchen expresses the duality contained within a photo, because it speaks of now and also “the catastrophe of death in the future.”
-Olivia Hatalsky
Geoffrey Batchen: Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography
Geoffrey Batchen addressed the significance and experience of photography through his essay on the Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. Words flowed from his mouth with quick tempo as he read his essay, trying to fortify photography’s importance. But in his endless flurry of eloquent gibberish, I failed to pick apart the points he stressed and decipher their significance.
As I came out of the room with dizzying words flying through my head, I remembered only a few arguments in his talk. Batchen claims Camera Lucida as the most important book on photography and the history of photography in the past twenty-five years. It is divided into two parts both with equal number of sections to mirror each other. Batchen states that photography abandoned its sociopolitical function. I’m not sure I agree with his remark, as photography continues to spell out hidden truths such as in the field of photojournalism. There are still those who seek to show the world the horrible truths through photos.
One comment he made stuck with me. He stated that amateur photographers are more in tough with their photos than professionals. Professionals are bogged down by their assignments, goals, and technicalities. In his claim, I feel he tries to preserve the innocence of amateur photographers, those experimenting and innovating new ways to portray a message through photographs. However, I doubt those were his intentions or meaning of his statement. Batchen moves on to stress the importance of the individual and private experience. The photograph not only replicates a moment in time, but also holds a story, emotion, care, and connections with the subject and photographer and viewer.
I am still unclear on his intentions and perhaps confused by his sociopolitical comments. However, an introduction into the history of photography and the Camera Lucida proves relevant to our class as we dive more into the power and meaning of imagery.
-Benjamin Louie
Great job to those of you who posted on the Batchen talk. I heard him speak tonight in San Francisco at the CameraWork gallery. He gave a different talk, but it was also about the history of photography. I realize it can be difficult to follow these lectures, and am impressed with your efforts and responses! Isn't it interesting how differently we hear the same information or what, out of too much information, we attend to and remember?
Geoffrey Batchen discussed Roland Barthes’ collection of photography in Camera Lucida and the personal connection Barthes incorporated into his work. While Camera Lucida covered a full survey of photography from 1820s to 1970s, Batchen asserted that Barthes intentionally biased his selection of photography in order to represent the idea of history as personally objective. Batchen included images of newspapers and other media sources to further demonstrate how history can be skewed with digitized photography. In Camera Lucida, Barthes even admits to being an “amateur” although Batchen suggested it was simply false modesty. Barthes understood that his collection could not be fully comprehensive and thus, calls himself an amateur despite being a renowned photographic historian in order to illustrate how all historians will incorporate some sort of bias and convey an inkling of amateurism.
Anthony Castanos M/W 9:30-11
In Geoffrey Batchen's talk about the book Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, he describes how the book and its major ideas are a direct reflection with Barthes's personal life and opinions. Batchen describes the book as the last great book on the history of photography, rather than other books being about the history on photography. The book is written in first person, as if Barthes is personally leading the reader through his ideas and concepts of photography, which allows people to become more personally connected while reading the book. Barthes chooses a very personal collection of photographs to be put into the book. The photos ranged from all eras of photography from 1823, supposedly the first photo ever taken, to 1979, the year the book was written. The book and the photographs have a lot to do with death and of Barthes's mother, who died before Barthes wrote the book. In the book Barthes describes a photograph of his mother that is never shown, and may not even exist, but the his description and feelings about the photo makes the mother image seem real and relatable to the reader's own mother experience. The title, Camera Lucida, comes from an instrument, made before cameras, where a person holds a prism at a certain angle that allows the light and an image on paper to be combined in the back of the observer’s retina. This duality, represented by the light and the image, is a major theme in the book. The book is divided into two equal sections, Batchen describes it as binary structure, in which the first half builds the reader up about Barthes ideas of punctum and studium, again the duality concept, as separate entities and then the second half talks about how the two are connected. Barthes develops a socio-political form of photography history where his images show famous political assassins of the past and also other political figures. His photographs also show personal feeling of the photographers. Batchen talks about how Barthes idea of the dual nature affects politics, in that politicians see everything in black and white or good and evil, which can be a problem in the real world. He proves this point by showing a photo of an Iraqi man's hands holding photos of his family members that died during a US bombing, showing that the US politicians black and white type of thinking can cause death and destruction.
Camera Lucida also brings up the idea of photograph consciousness, the idea that photograph are able to depict emotions. Also the photograph is able to induce a psychological association with the image and emotions are stirred. This goes along the with the seen and unseen details of a photograph. The seen being the object photographed and the unseen being the emotions and actions the object implies. This is why Barthes thinks amateurs make the best photographers, because they are able to offer more in their photographs since they are not looking for any particular moment and are not able to be biased like professionals. Barthes likes to consider himself an amateur writer, but Batchen points out that Barthes is the most professional amateur writer in existence.
Barthes believes that recent photography is just a ghost of its former self. With all the technology and media bias he believes that nobody is really able to observe true photography. He even goes as to say that he is the last person to view true photography.
Geoffrey Batchen’s speech focused on an autobiographical novel, “Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography” (C.L.) by Roland Barthes. This book or collection was created in 1979. It is comprised mostly of black and white photos. The piece is split into two equal parts which mirror one another; this was not an accident. Within the parts, however, the photos are not necessarily in a particular order.
Throughout the collection Barthes takes on the role of a common spectator. With this, the audience is always aware that he is telling the story or writing the history. Because this is true the audience is attentive to a bias (though most don’t care). Since the ‘story-teller’ is a common man he has selected photos that represent the common. There are portraits and photos that one might find within their own home. People can relate and the photos are timeless. The audience can personally recount similar situations. And “every photo deals with the present, but also the inevitable death of the future.” These are two possible reasons that the book has been so powerful for over 25 years.
One of the main things I noticed during the lecture was how different yet similar this work of art is from the piece “Battle of Lights (B.L.)” They are similar in that they are both famous pieces of work; they capture moments in time and space; and to many they have more meaning than what first hits the eye. They are different in that C.L. is a collection of many frames while B.L. is one single image; and the images within C.L. are black and white while the image of B.L. is extremely colorful.
Laura Wood
On Monday, Geoffrey Batchen gave a speech about Roland Barthes’ book called Camera Lucida. Batchen claimed that Camera was one of the last great books on photography, as opposed to a book on the history of previously taken photographs. This surprised me because this book was supposedly written in the first person because I think that it would be hard to write a book on an academic field in the first person without being frequently sidetracked and sounding somewhat pompous. He goes on to talk about how Barthes’ admires the “amateur” photographer because they do not have a hidden agenda like most professionals do. Batchen connects this idea of bias with a “binary” concept, which he states many politicians use today. As an example, he talked about the black and white tactics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. He then showed his audience newspaper article that talked about how 40+ Iraqis were killed by a U.S. bombing, which included a picture of two hands holding pictures of the victims. Batchen told us that this photo is powerful in that it is able to send its viewers a strong message of pain and suffering from that moment, which relates to our class because the photograph stored the true emotions of that specific moment in time for future usage. He asserts that these binary tactics on the part of the Bush administration have caused this. This seems tragically ironic to me because just after calling himself somewhat of an unbiased “amateur,” he slips in this controversial statement to appease his audience. He ends his speech with a nostalgic tone by saying that true, unaltered and unbiased photography is being wiped out by big media.
-Christopher Melgaard
Geoffrey Batchen’s talk was a long, unenthusiastic, and almost interesting verbal reading of the paper in front of him. I am not sure if I was uninterested because of Dr. Batchen’s presentation, or the topic, “Camera Lucida”, which was completely abstract for me. However, I resisted the temptation of my daydreams and I managed to take a few notes. My response is probably a little incomplete.
Batchen began with a joke, he said, Roland Barthes always names his books after porn titles. Or at least I’m pretty sure that is what he said. But if Camera Lucida is the title of a porn, I have never seen it. Later, on a serious note Batchen said the book was named after an optical device used by artists in the 1800’s. Batchen mentioned this because using a camera lucida is a private, individual, experience. “Camera Lucida” was published 25 years ago and is still widely reviewed and discussed. This book is said to have transformed the way the history of photography is written. Barthes chose the photographs featured in the book by his preference. He also wrote false analyses next to some of the photographs. Barthes believed that the choice of the photograph is not nearly as important as the analysis, meaning that it can be changed over and over again. However, what he adds in his analyses is nonetheless already there. Then Batchen said a lot of other mind-numbing stuff and after an hour, it was over.
Leesha Tenns
Geoffrey Batchen spoke about Ronald Barthes's Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. The title of his talk was "Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography" but several times he mentioned that this book wasn't like the other books written on the history of photography. Other books concentrated more on the technological and cultural history of photography. However, Barthes's book approaches the history from the angle of reviewing masterpieces of photography and reliving the moment captured in the photograph. For example, he presented the pictures of a businessman standing still in a frame representing a man with "no impulse of power." This was followed by a slave identically photographed representing a man who "is dead and is going to die." It's interesting that Barthes's put these two pictures together and Batchen presentes this as an intention to stress analysis. Plus this approach of telling the history of photography is more artistic than the traditional way other writers were doing so at the time. The phrase Batchen used was an "avant garde form of history" versus a "history of avant garde pictures." This approach to recounting the history of photography was refreshing to me. Though it is important to learn the technological advances behind photography, it's much more interesting to see the vision that drove these advances and to see the outcome of how photographers used these advances. The time in which Barthes's book was written and published was just as the digital camera came out. It's interesting to see how photographers used (in today's view) seemingly obsolete technology to compose and imprint an emotion/experience/enlightenment into a photograph compared to how today with a digital camera a photographer can capture any and every moment and choose the best composition or most meaningful of them all (like "What Happened on Twenty-Third Street").
In this lecture, Geoffrey Batchen discussed the book titled Camera Lucinda: Another Little History of Photography by Roland Barthes. This book is an autobiographical novel that is a collection of photographic images that reflected upon not only photography, but the relationship between the viewer and the image. This was the argument that Batchen made with Barthes book. Batchen also spoke of how photography shows the audience, not only the present (the moment in which the imagge was snapped), but also the past which lead to this moment, and the future which was to immediately follow it. Everything is related in this manner. Everything is connected. Though we may see the present, we see the influences and remains of the past.
For the most part, Batchen's was rather effective in describing a detailed enough breakdown of the book and its contents for those unfamiliar with its texts. He even discussed how the book did contrast between good and evil and even the element of death. Not just for the author's own death, but that of his mother. In this Catchen explained the outside influences which held sway over Barthes when creating this book.
One fact that Batchen's highlighted during the lecture was Barthes' choice in the title. The name Camera Lucinda, as Batchen stated, was an inward looking appartatus, which seems to contradict the entire message of Barthes' book. For Camera Lucinda, unlike its title states, was created as an instrument for the viewer to use as an apparatus for looking outward, towards the world that surrounds us.
Though the subject was interesting and unique, it was rather dull, in that Batchen read directly from his paper (a sort of essay about an essay),and a bit too complex in its discussions of the books literary significance. By the end when the question and answer period came, it was no small surprise that much of the audience was unsure as of what to say.
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