Topic 6

Photography
Objectives of this lecture:

To look at two theories of photography—the

theory of the indexical sign, and the theory of the
punctum

To introduce semiotics

To introduce structuralism

Note: this material was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com, under “Syllabi.” Send all comments to jelkins@artic.edu
Organization of this lecture:

1. Introduction to theories of photography

2. Introduction to semiotics, followed by a review of

Peirce’s semiotics as they pertain to photography

3. Introduction to structuralism, followed by

Barthes’s theory in Camera lucida
 1. Introduction: Photography and Theory

Photography has an increasingly complicated body of theory that

supports (or seeks to support) its practice.

As a preliminary assessment:

A. Literature in the origins of photography,

—tracing it for example from the camera obscura (Peter Galassi)
—or from capitalism, science, and leisure (Jonathan Crary)

B. Literature in the theory of photography

—investigating claims of its pictorial nature (Joel Snyder)
—using semiotics to explain photographic images (Rosalind Krauss)

C. Literature in the place of photography in relation to fine art

—on vernacular photography (Graham Smith, History of Photography)
—on surrealism and women photographers (Rosalind Krauss)
In the last twenty years, photography has been increasingly accepted as a
fine art: there are now more museums with a Photography Department,
and more professors of the history and theory of photography in art
history departments

Photography is still a difficult “sell” in the market and in academia; and in

museums, photography departments are often small...

Concepts, names, and works

Peter Galassi
Rosalind Krauss
Joel Snyder
Graham Smith
Jonathan Crary
photography as a fine art
 2. Semiotic theories of photography
In this lecture we will sample two theories that have been used to
underwrite photography.

The first is a semiotic theory, which relies on a reading of the work of

Charles Sanders Peirce, and American philosopher and mathematician.
(Pronounced “purse.”)

The part of Peirce’s work that is relevant here is his theory of semiotics.

Semiotics: the study of how meaning is generated and disseminated by

means of symbols. For example, the word “dog” denotes the concept dog;
what is the relation between them?

(The word symbol is not used in semiotics because it has the connotation
of heavily culturally loaded meanings: the crucifix is a “symbol” in that
sense.) Concepts, names,
and works

Charles Peirce
semiotics
symbol sign
There are two principal sources for semiotics:

Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), Charles Peirce (1839-1914).

The two theories are wholly different and do in different directions:

Saussure’s is linguistic (we encountered him in relation to Lacan), and
Peirce’s is epistemological (i.e., having to do with theories of knowledge).

A normal starting place for theories of semiotics are the two concepts
signifier and signified.

Signifier (sometimes just called the sign, although that term should be the
general one):
French: signifiant. The physical medium (sound, image, etc.).
For example: the sound (phonemes) of the word dog

Signified: Concepts, names,

French: signifié. The meaning of the word dog and works

Ferdinand Saussure
signifier
signified
Other terms useful in semiotics:

Syntax, syntactics:
The relations between signs within language or any system of meaning
For example: the relations between subject, verb, and object
—or the relations between forms, objects, or colors in an artwork

Semantics:
The relations between the signs in the system of meaning and the world
For example: the relation between a photographed tree and the tree

Pragmatics:
The study of the operation of signs in language

Concepts, names,
and works

syntax
semantics
pragmatics
(More terms useful in semiotics)

Dense, disjoint (= analog, digital)

These terms are from another philosopher who contributed to semiotics, Nelson Goodman
(1906-1998)

Roughly, in his work dense signs are those with no boundaries, for example brushmarks in an oil
painting

Disjoint signs have boundaries, for example letters in a word, which have white spaces

Goodman called those analog and digital (he was thinking of watches)

In Saussure a similar concept of disjointness is called oppositional: language, he wrote, is a system

of opposed signs, creating meaning by a system of difference:

No signs (for example, the word dog) have meaning intrinsically, but they accrue meaning by their
differential opposition to other terms (cat, giraffe, wolf...)

Nelson Goodman oppositional

Concepts, names, dense system of difference
and works: disjoint analog, digital
Semiotics in Peirce’s system:

For Peirce a sign is by its nature triadic, since Peirce defines it as

“something which stands to somebody for something in some
respect or capacity.”

Hence every sign has three divisions: “the sign in itself, the sign as
related to its object, and the sign as interpreted to represent an
object.”

Concepts, names,
and works

The rudimentary diagram of perspective for example (see lecture on

Firstmess Lacan) consists of the observing subject, the seen object, and the
Secondness picture.
Thirdness
Division of signs Here the first division, the sign “in itself,” is the middle term of the
Interpretant diagram, the second, the sign “as related to its object,” becomes the
combination of the middle and the right of the diagram, and the third,
“the sign as interpreted to represent an object,” corresponds to the
entire diagram.

Peirce often calls this relation firstness, secondness, thirdness: signs

in themselves, signs in relations to others signs, and signs that
cannot be separated from laws and relations
The element of Peirce’s semiotics that has been used to define
photography is the triad icon, index, symbol.

All signs, Peirce says, are partly iconic (they denote by resembling their objects),
indexical (they are “really affected” by their objects), and symbolic (they denote “by
virtue of a law”)

For example:

A photograph of a tree resembles the tree, and so it is an iconic sign

The smoke from a fire is physically affected (caused) by the fire, so it is a
sign of the fire
The word dog denotes the concept dog because of a “law” (a convention,
an agreement); hence it is a symbolic sign

Concepts, names,
and works

icon
index
symbol
Theorists of photography have said that photography is an indexical art because the light
(photons) physically cause the image.

This would make it unlike painting, for example.

These theorists (Rosalind Krauss, Fred Orton, many others) take only the schematic idea of
the index, which is more complicated in Peirce’s writing.

First problem: Peirce says all signs are simultaneously iconic, indexical, and symbolic:
“Take, for instance, “it rains.” Here the icon is the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker
has experienced. The index is all whereby he distinguishes that day, as it is placed in his experience. The symbol
is the mental act whereby [he] stamps that day as rainy.”

Second problem: it becomes counter-intuitive to insist on indexical or symbolic

characteristics of photography (this is David O’Neil):

[A] photograph signifies at least in part iconically by manifesting, for example, the scalar relationships, the
silhouettes and the tonal modulations of its object(s). These features constitute only some of those possessed by
the photograph. Other properties such as its weight, taste, smell, size, and spatial extension are not generally
those which are asked to carry any significatory responsibility.… The parameters of iconicity, the selection of
properties which will serve as conduits of reference is contractual.… Islands of iconicity float in seas of
convention…
What is indexical, symbolic, and iconic in a typical photograph?

Iconic: landscape... in a sense, the

entire scene is legible because it is
iconic

Symbolic: —or is it taken to be iconic?

In an obvious sense: the castle is
symbolic of romantic history,
vacations, etc. The dog is symbolic of
bourgeois entertainment... but the
entire scene could also be argued to
be symbolic: comprehensible because
it has conventional meaning.

Indexical: The entire scene could also

be taken as indexical, since photons
created it.
Saying that photography is indexical has at least the following advantages:

1. It ties photography to the anti-transcendental strain in modernism, in

which nothing is denoted beyond the substance (materiality) of the art
object

2. And therefore it ties photography to minimalism (which stresses the

work itself, in its immediate physical presence)

3. It stresses the mechanical nature of photography, and so it helps

dissociate photography from the cult of the artist as genius, which has
been taken since mid-century as a remnant of early modernist and
romantic art

And it has at least the following disadvantages: Concepts, names,

and works
1. It is a poor (loose, partial) reading of Peirce
2. It is counter-intuitive anti-transcendental
3. By stressing the essence of the medium, it returns to materiality
Clement Greenberg’s modernist interest in the purity of essence of a medium
each medium—an idea that is not often in line with minimalism
explorations of multimedia artist as genius
 2. Roland Barthes’s Camera lucida
Barthes was also interested in semiotics; his method was often a combination of semiotic analysis
and structuralism.

Structuralism: an interpretive method made influentual by the anthropologist Claude Léve-Strauss.

The fundamental notion is to organize the operative concepts of a culture into pairs of opposites,
arranged in a “semiotic square”

For example:
Relation of opposites
Past Future

Relations of negations Relations of mediates

Atemporality (negates Present (mediates past

both past and future) and future)
There are at least three philosophic strands in Camera
lucida: semiotics, structuralism, and phenomenology.
Concepts, names,
Phenomenology is a philosophy that stresses the and works
importance and primacy of appearances, and in
particular those that have bodily meaning (objects made,
as Barthes says to the “measure” of a person’s body Edmund Husserl
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Phenomenology is associatwed with Edmund Husserl phenomenology
(1859-1938), and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-
1961). Barthes is thinking of Merleau-Ponty when he
identifies himself as a phenomenologist.

Merleau-Ponty is important in general to art criticism

and art history; he wrote an influential essay on
Cézanne.

Barthes is an informal follower—a group that could also

be said to include such diverse writers as the art
historan Michael Fried, and the Marxist critic John
Berger.

Watch, in Camera lucida, to see what Barthes means by

calling himself a “heuristic” (i.e., informal)
phenomenologist
A bit more background on Barthes:

His essay “The Photographic Image” is also relevant.

In it he analyzes an Italian ad for a kind of pasta called Panzani.

He imagines the advertisement stripped of its semiotic significance—its “codes” as he calls

them.

Imagine the writing (”Panzani,” etc.) is illegible or absent,

the imagine that there is no advertising context,
that we don’t have knowledge of the objects (tomatoes, mesh bag...)

What is left, he says, is an “uncoded image”: pure light, visibility, color, but no sense of language

The essay is a strange kind of dead-end in analysis, since there is nothing more that can be said.
It is a strategy he does not follow in Camera lucida, although he insists throughout that
photographs have no intrinsic meaning. (”Code” appears, however: e.g., p. 51.)

codes
Concepts, names,
uncoded image
and works:
“The Photographic Image”
Key concepts in Camera lucida, with images for discussion:

1. Studium
The coded part of the image = the public part
“A kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” (p. 26)
“A kind of education” (p. 28); something that is fully intelligible (p. 57)

U.S.
Government
photo of a
fallout
shelter
2. Punctum
The complementary term to studium
The uncoded, non-linguistic, purely visual,
subjective and personal part of a viewer’s response to a photo
Something that attacks the eye, makes a “mark or sign” (p. 25); it entails a “blind field” (p. 57)

Rick
Rocamora,
Mental
Patient in
Manila.
From
http://
www.pacificn
ews.org/yo/
photo/manila-
children/
rocamora-
mental.html
3. The emphasis on vernacular photography, as opposed to scientific photography
The reference is to Sam “Doc” Edgerton (who made photos of bullets going through balloons)
That kind of work is unrelated to the body’s experience of the world because it’s 1/1,000,000 sec.
Is that a convincing argument? (p. 33).

Family photo.
From http://www.steve.odell.dial.pipex.com/wimpole/wimpole%20families.shtml
 Gold atoms (example of a non-vernacular image)
From http://www.uni-ulm.de/elektronenmikroskopie/Mat-Forsch-MPI-MetC.html
3. Photographic “shock” (5 varieties)
This is on p. 32. Note the critique at the end of the section.

Andre Kertesz, Horse Dying at His Cart

4. Jouissance
A key term in French psychoanalysis; pleasure in a libidinal sense, not necessarily sexual,
but with a sexual overtone. “The pleasure of the text” is one of Barthes’s concerns

Bill Brandt photo

From http://www.radiomontaje.com.ar/homecentro.htm
 5. Simulacrum
Which we have encountered in Guy Debord.
An image or a likeness of something: i.e., not the
object itself, but a shadowy substitute
Barthes was interested in images as simulacra
especially in The Empire of Signs (on Japan)

Concepts, names,
and works

Jouissance
punctum
studium
“shock”
Operator
vernacular

Tokyo street
From http://
www.halfbakery.com/idea/
London_20$1tr_20ono_2e
 6. The Operator
On pp. 9, 28: this is a crucial concept for visual
studies
The Operator is the agent who creates the image:
understanding the Operator is one of the principal
goals of visual studies analyses

Concepts, names,
and works

Jouissance
punctum
Model with studium
Armani clothes “shock”
From http:// Operator
home.enter.vg/
tanita/pictures.htm