CS251 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Sisal, Roland Barthes, Industrial Revolution
CS251
Monday, September 18, 2017
The Image as Object Of and For Power
Looking
•Looking is a social practice, whether we do it by choice or compliance
•Through looking, and thorough touching , and hearing as a means of navigating space
organized.
•Like other practices, looking involved relationships of power, To willfully look or not is to
exercise choice and compliance and to influence whether and how others look
•To be made to look, to try to get someone else o look at you or at something you want to be
noticed, or to engage in an exchange of looks entails a play of power.” (Sturken & Cartwright,
9)
•Image can control end representation
•Ex. Mugshots
•Ability to control impressions
•Camera doesn't lie
Emmet Till
•14-year-old boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1995
•Allegedly waisted at a white woman, was accosted by a group of white men, tortured, beaten.
(11)
•“Till’s mother, recognizing the power of visual experience evidence, instead on holding an
open-casket funeral
•“She allowed his corpse to be photographed so everyone could see the gruesome evidence of
violence exacted upon her son”
•“In this image, the power of the photograph to provide evidence of violence and injustice is
coupled with the photograph’s power to shock and horrify.” (11)
•Photographs don't die
Representation
•“Representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world
around us
•A language has a set of rules about how to express and interest meaning. So do the systems
of representation used in painting, drawing, photography, cinema, television, and digital
media.
•Although these systems representations are not languages, they are in some ways like
language systems and therefore can be analyzed through methods borrowed from linguists
and semiotics” (12)
•Representation of the fear, terrorism carried out against African Americans
•Languages are repetitive systems of representation
Constructing Meaning
•“We construct the meaning of things through the process of representing them.”
•“Although the concept of mimesis has a long history today it is no longer accepted that
representations are mere copies of things as they are or as the person who created them
believes they ought to be” (12)
•Meaning implies interpretations
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CS251
Monday, September 18, 2017
•Read things differently because of who we are
•idea of intractable, indestructible message connected to language
Still Life
•“one might surmise that the sill life is motivated by the desire of reflect, rather thank meaning
of material objects as they appear in the world” (12)
•Attempt to be photographer before there was photography
The Treachery of Images
•“One could not pick up and smoke this pipe. So Magritte can be seen to be pointing out
something so obvious as to render the written message absurd.
•“He highlights the very act of labeling as something we should think about, drawing our
attention to the word “pipe” and the limits of its function in representing the object, as well as
the limits of the drawing in representing the pipe”
•“Magritte asks us to consider how labels and images produce meaning yet cannot fully invoke
the experience of the object” (15)
•Hoarders of presentation
•Idealized form of representation
Decisions, Decisions…
•“it is true that that some types of image recording seem to take place without human
intervention”
•“In surveillance videos, for instance. no one stands behind the lens to determine what and
how any particular event should be shot. Yet even in surveillance video, someone has
programmed the camera to record a particular part of a space and to frame that space in a
particular way”
•“It remains the photographer who frames and takes the image, not the camera itself. yet,
despite the subjective aspects of the act of taking a picture, the aura of machine objectivity
clings to technical and electronic images” (16)
•Cameras don’t have biases
Positivism
•“Positivism, a philosophy that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, holds the scientific
knowledge is thinly authentic knowledge and concerns itself with truths about the world”
•“In positivism, the individual actions of the scientific came to be viewed as a liability in the
process of performing and reproducing experiments, as it was thought that the scientist’s own
performing and reproducing experiments, as it was thought that scientist’s own subjective
actions might influence the outcome or skew the objectivity of the experiment”
•“Hence, in positivism.. evidence”
•“In the context.. accurately “(17)
•More you remove people from scientific methods, the cleaner the outcomes are
•Mid 19th century - height of industrial revolution
•Physical attributes to see if one is a criminal very similar to using finger prints in todays society
Now and Then
•“A photograph is often … evidence of the real”
•“photographs have been… place in history”
•“The French theorist…(the referent, or object, thing, or place)”
•“This conjunction relies on a myth of photographic truth.” (17)
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