Pictures of...

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Blow Up - a transient - corner-of-the-eye evanescence. Amplified. Amplified. Amplified, copied and blown up.  Blow Up. Noise floor pulls up to ensnare and mutate.
"Mankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." Susan Sontag from 'On Photography' - originally published in The New York Review of Books.

My final-year thesis, and this is a -very- long time ago - was an attempted critique of an essay by Roland Barthes - 'The Rhetoric of the Image', which posited that photographs, by their very nature are essentially, purely denotative of reality. The essay was originally presented to us on our art history and theory course as a seminar piece. Asked what I thought about it, I instinctively said that I thought he was wrong - actually I said it was bollocks. Challenged as to why this was the case - given that my lecturer agreed with me - I couldn't give a reason. And neither could he, which made me think there was something to look into and maybe write about.

After eight months of head-scratching, heuristic diagrams and much soul-searching, I wrote the bloody thesis in three days, getting it submitted with literally twenty minutes to spare. It was poorly presented and scrappy, but struck some sort of chord with the assessors and I got through.

What I didn't realise was that my degree show in and of itself was a vindication - maybe it was an unconscious transition on my part to start producing the photographs I was making - of exactly what I had attempted to say in my thesis.

Now, well no-one in their right mind would argue Barthes' position. Photoshop, AI, deep fakes, Instagram filters - reality really is subservient to the form - maybe the Medium is the Message, after all. Or not.

Maybe there's a thesis in this after all...

Comments

  1. Steve8 April 2020 at 15:26

    Not sure I can argue one way or the other about Mr Barthes' postulations however your final paragraph brings to mind a book I used to have that looking back was years ahead of its time - 'The Medium Is The Massage' (Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore - Penguin Books 1967). A mixture of text, image and photography McLuhan argues that the growth of technology has reshaped society, personal lives and sensory perceptions. Given the time that the book was written/conceived it was exceptionally perceptive and he could not have foreseen just how dominant the 'massage' would become in the later part of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sideways8 April 2020 at 21:22

    Still got my copy of said book, somewhere - got a feeling I nicked it from the school library, mea culpa.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sideways8 April 2020 at 21:26

      Said book followed on from Marshall McLuhan's earlier, seminal tome The Medium is the Message - a copy of which I must still have somewhere in storage...

      Delete
  3. sideways9 April 2020 at 18:03

    Mis-remembered (ah, sweet age...) The book was actually called "Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man" - the first chapter was called 'The Medium is the Message' - I must see if I can find my copy...

    ReplyDelete

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