Sight and Grizzly Man

Firstly, Harrison, thank you for bringing up the point about the believability of photography within the modern world, I think that in a modern context Barthes' ideas about photography showing reality without truly being influenced by a human hand would need to be reconsidered. I think our generation is, in fact, very skeptical about the realism of photos. No one looks at pictures of models in magazines anymore without thinking "well that's not what they really look like, it's all airbrushed anyway." We find ourselves looking up on snopes.com whether the latest photo released of some politician doing something stupid or inappropriate is Photoshopped or not. Your example of that glass is really a vivid example of, as you mentioned, the obsession with realism that is now a part of photography as it used to be with painting. In addition to this, the use of digital photography and programs like Photoshop allows the artist to have much more of a hand in the creation of the image, which speaks against Barthes' idea of a relatively unaltered picture of reality.
I think an interesting question, though I know it is very vague, is why sight itself is so equivalent with truth in the human mind. We are all very well aware of the fact that our eyes often "play tricks" on us, we even enjoy looking at optical illusions, allowing ourselves to be fooled, and yet we still rely so much on our sense of sight as proof and evidence. This phenomenon, I think, is part of what makes film and photography such powerful art forms. And has our (I think rightful) skepticism towards digital photgraphy, altered our reliance on sight, so much stronger than that on our other senses?
One other, relatively unrelated, point about Grizzly Man: Isabel alluded to this as well, but I think the sense of death that Barthes talks about being embodied in the photo was extremely applicable to Grizzly Man. Partially, of course, this feeling is emphasized by the fact that the narrator talks about Treadwell's death as we are watching the footage of him alive, but also I feel it had something to do with the realism of the footage itself, cut as it was. Treadwell, being basically completely alone, I feel was for many portions of the video very much simply himself in front of the camera. We see him cursing himself for takes that didn't go well, we hear him speaking freely, without a script, often quite inarticulately, his speech fueled much more by emotion than intellect. The footage, no doubt meant to be edited and censored by Treadwell, was instead shown in a very raw and real form. This made Treadwell, for me at least, a very real person rather than a character, removing that duality of identification that is so often a part of cinema. This identification with solely a "real" person, not a fictional character in any way, made the sense of this footage as defying a death that we are consciously aware of throughout the film very powerful.

Treadwell.

I found it intersting in looking at Tim Treadwell as a photographic subject. As a result of filming himself he was naturally aware that he was being filmed and as Barthes argues; he could not help but to contrive a pose. Treadwell aims assure that the image captured in the photo coincides with his "self" or the "self" he wants to portray to the audience. While Treadwell believes his focus is on the grizzlies and nature; the audience comes to the conclusion that the indirect focus is on Treadwell. In his work Treadwell was not the individual but rather the filmmaker Treadwell. This posing as the filmmaker was complimented by Werner Herzog's inclusion of the outtakes, re-shoots, and rants that could all be deemed "real" and not posed. I feel as though there is a necessity on Treadwell's part to keep his filming about the bears and away from the bears relationship to his life personally. Treadwell makes a concious effort to maintain what Barthes describes as our "air (110)". However the brillance in the film is when he breaks his concious shapping of his character and is "raw". While it is still on flim he does not believe he will include the segments in his actual production. The moments where he steps out of his Treadwell filmmaker role are the most interesting and the best indicators of who this complex character really was.

The Credibility of the Photograph in the Digital Age

Bazin writes that “the objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” (13). Barthes seems to assign the same value of credibility to the photograph. These statements got me thinking about whether the photograph in the digital age can still be perceived as a credible source. Photographs have always been able to be manipulated through optical effects, but the advent of digital photography and image editing programs like photoshop have made it much easier to profoundly alter images. It’s usually easy to tell that a photo is false when the Photoshop work is done poorly, but with enough time and skill, a person can create a fake image that looks totally believable. Furthermore, the rapid advance of computer graphics can blur the line between the artificial and the real. Taken side by a side, a good CG render of an object might be indistinguishable from an actual photograph of the same object. For example, look at the below images. Without reading the text at the top, see if you can determine which one is CG and which one is a digital photograph.




The practice of computer graphic is often obsessed with realism, analyzing objects down to minute texture details and interactions with light. Bazin argues that photography has liberated painting from the confines of realism, but this cannot be applied to the relatively new art of CG which has gone in the opposite direction. As game designers and computer scientists continue to develop new computational models to render photorealistic worlds, the line between the real and the fabricated will become even more pervasive.
Since digital technology can be (and is often) used to undermine the association between photography and the real, can we still say that photograph is “credible”? Or must we instead develop a kind of “paranoid” relation to the photographic image, insure of its truth and thus questioning of its authenticity?

La jetée photography and cinema (and paint just for the hell of it)

La jetee quite obviously drew our attention to the subtlety of the differences between cinema and photography. Since it is a "film" made up of still photographs it can be analyzed as both film and photography. Another interesting follow up question is: at what points of the short does it become film and at what points does it become photography? This line actually seems quite simple to draw. In certain shots the focus is on motion and the still frames in sequence actually become a primitive type of animation. It is at these moments in the short that it becomes more film than photography. For example, I would classify the scene in which the main character is running down the dock as film. Scenes which focus more on individual still frames tip the balance toward photography (such as scenes at the site of the experiment which would switch between different shots of characters faces without focus on any particular sense of motion). This poses an interesting challenge to the audience. Throughout the duration of the film the viewer must switch from interpreting the short as film and interpreting the short as photography within mere seconds. Due to the celerity at which the film progresses the viewer must then focus almost entirely on the punctum of each individual photograph. There simply is not much time to focus on anything else. Each viewer will notice what first jumps out at him or her and almost immediately after a new frame will arrive on screen. This interestingly puts the film somewhat out of the directors hands and also opens it up to a more broad variety of interpretations. Since each viewer will likely have different punctum for each frame the director somewhat loses control of the visual direction of the film. Each viewer will notice and focus on different details that produce a quick and strong reaction. With all of these puncta going through one's mind at once combined with the switches between more filmic aspects and more photographic aspects the film almost becomes and exhausting experience for the viewer, but more importantly a somewhat obvious and extremely effective meditation on the differences between film and photography (and to think this covers only what the film accomplishes within it's form, disregarding any sense of plot or other issues not directly related to form).

Also I thought I would include something as a bonus. Approximately three weeks ago I completed a black and white gouache painting based upon a frame taken from La jetee (this realization didn't hit me until I began watching the film). I thought it would be interesting to include it. The frame it is based upon occurs at the point in the film when the narrator says "Until, ahead of him, he senses a wall" or something to that effect. The body parts that I have superimposed on the painting were taken from a separate source. 

Photography and truth

Does the photograph necessarily represent a truth?  Barthes seems to suggest that it does; however, this is an extremely dangerous acceptance and one that is based on viewer subjectivity when truth, I would contend is universal.  He identifies "truth and reality in a unique emotion" (77) stemming from the punctum and his interaction with the Winter Garden photograph.  His notion of the punctum is based on a subjective view of the photograph.  What is the punctum for me, is not necessarily the punctum for someone else.  Even if the "unique emotion" that the particular punctum for an individual stimulates is a photographic truth, it is not necessarily an absolute truth.  If we accept Barthes' assertion that the photograph, by definition is "what has been" (85), we accept only that it captures a reality, not a truth; the truth he asserts is rather a truth in regards to the nature of photography and what attracts a viewer to a particular photograph, not the absolute truths that are universal.  

Furthermore, this reality is not necessarily truthful; a photograph can be manipulated and indeed the reading, as Barthes acknowledges, is subjective, as well as, what the photographer chooses to photograph and how.  The potential for photography to become a propagandistic or otherwise distorting agent is enormous.  Barthes contends that the madness of photography is that it is a representation that can assure him of the past of a thing: "with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate" (115), but with digital photography and the easy manipulation of photographs, this blind acceptance poses an enormous threat.  

This brings to mind Barthes' discussion of the Photograph as a subversive agent, "not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks" (38).  In light of the advances in digital technology the potential for photography to "think" expands and becomes something uncontrollable by the public, but increasingly controlled by the agents that employ photography.  Barthes describes the photograph as violent "because it fills the sight by force" (91); though while he uses this to transition into his discussion of photography reminding him of his imminent death whether he like it or not, he does not address the potential for this characteristic to manipulate the viewer.  I found interesting the similar language used by Barthes and Keenan; similar to how Keenan viewed language as a violent light breaking into the private, Barthes employs similar language also to refer to the knowledge forcefully imparted by the Photograph.  

Thus we return to the notion of knowledge and whether knowing more is "enlightenment," whether knowledge leads to action (Keenan), whether the photograph can be an agent of action.  A representation of reality, I would agree, in Barthes' terms that it captures something, that has been, even if it is only the particular frequencies of light existing in a moment; to accept blindly any more would be to put put oneself at risk of being manipulated; it is not necessarily objective or without mediator.  The Photograph is complicated by the tension between reality and truth.  Truths, I would argue are universal and objective, something that the photograph perhaps can be, but is not necessarily.  

The Legitimacy of the Punctum

Barthes’ concepts of the studium and the punctum are understandable, but throughout he seemed to come to the punctum as an emotional conclusion as opposed to a logical conclusion.  Its very definition (a “sting, peck, cut, little hole”) implies that it is outside the completely rational.  I understand this idea and even relate to it when I view certain photographs, but this answer just isn’t very satisfying.  I feel there should be a more objective understanding of how photos affect us.  The idea of the punctum seems to be so free that anything in the photo can strike its viewer and elevate the photo from one that is “liked” to one that is “loved.”  The cause and the effect are too vaguely defined.

 

Barthes does become more specific when he defines his second punctum, which is Time.  Because the photo becomes a “that-has-been,” the spectator becomes aware of Death.  This forces us to contemplate our own death, and therefore the reading of the photograph becomes much more personal.  This version of punctum that is related to time seems more productive through its specificity. 

“La jetée,” the punctum, & cinema

Bathes’ remarks in section 23 of Camera Lucida claim that cinema, while it has no punctum, nevertheless engenders a “blind field” to which photographs with punctums also provide access. In other words, the two arts use different means to achieve the same end of bringing out what some theorist, in one of their less flattering moments, might call the artfulness of art (a little joke). I wish to consider that effect of the “blind field”, which Barthes describes on page 57 as something like the phenomenon of bringing out the life or nature of the image, particularly in the context of the blurry line between photography and film exemplified by “La jetée.”

The film is composed of a series of photographs, each shown for a number of seconds, slideshow style, and a narrator and score. Consequently, for most of the film, there is enough time to be “free to shut [one’s] eyes” and in so doing to discover the punctum of the images (55). The use of the punctum in film is achieved in other ways outside of La jetée as well, for example through slow motion, freeze frames, repeating images and motifs. In short, one is given time away from the image to “allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.” Incidentally, and as a result, La jetée was in my opinion the most emotionally affecting film we have seen in the Screens and Projections series.

In La jetée itself, the narrator in his introduction of the protagonists’ mysterious memory of the pier at the airport says that, “Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.” This claim would suggest that memory works like photography too, with that which we remember being the punctum of our ordinary moments, our experiences. When viewed next to Kafka’s idea that “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds…a way of shutting [one’s] eyes” (54) taking photographs, or continuing to live and accrue ordinary experience, are a temporary relief from the “sting” (27) of the punctum, which comes from the idea, perhaps, that “what the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once…” (4), despite the blind field of life surrounding it. In other words, it is only an absence which can elevate art, and by then, the moment is already gone.

Swords?

I don’t know what about Barthes changed, but I found myself liking him in this book, as opposed to in Mythologies. My copy of Camera Lucida has various meaningful and meaningless annotations in what appear to be several languages, and there are several at the beginning that focus on death. At any rate, death and photography makes me think of Goosebumps (Say Cheese and Die).

I don’t think there’s a single untruth in the whole book (well, other than the few things from the beginning that he must rethink or rephrase near the end as he works through them in his thoughts). The main emphasis, that photographs display “that-has-been,” was, is, and always will be true. In terms of digital cameras, there is no way to retain, instantly, the situation of a photograph without it becoming a video. Therefore, as soon as it is taken, the referent has become changed, however slightly, whether by temporal or physical displacement. This quality of the photo being permanently of one referent, as it was in the past, automatically links it to death.

I don’t think you can take a photo that isn’t reminiscent of death. Even the brightest, happiest photos (like those in Kodak Picture Enhancer [or something] commercials), are frozen in time. You must recognize that, relative to the time in the photo, those people are going to die. I think, and have no reason to believe that nobody else does, the very attraction of photos comes from the fact that the moment captured doesn’t last forever (“take a picture, it lasts longer”). The photo comes with (or recreates) a memory, and, for whatever reason, it seems people desire to live on in memory. Like biographies and such, the photo becomes, similar to what Bazin said, a corporeal replacement. This is “the preservation of life by a representation of life” (Bazin, 10). Thus, the photo, consciously or not, is a weapon with which to fight death, though, paradoxically, an eerie harbinger of the death it is to fight. You can have a pretty sword, but it’s still a sword.

The "That-Has-Been" in the Age of Instantaneousness

For Barthes in Camera Lucida, the essence of the photograph lies in the past, in the realization that the object represented (and he emphasizes this word as the photographer's re-presentation of something that has been to the spectator of the future) existed at one point. It is at once an emphasis of the object's reality - for unlike the less exact arts of copying, photography is dependent upon this reality - and a distancing from it, for the reality expressed is one of the past with little or nothing to speak of regarding the present day. The photographs Barthes uses as a basis for these arguments largely stand by this concept, and it is reasonable to say they represent a decent cross-section of the photography readily available to him, or at least those aspects he found personally interesting - those which for him possessed a distinct punctum. These images are frequently historical, drawing out Barthes' fascination with the photographic image as the bearer of "that-has-been". In this one-time presence, he seeks to draw a line to the concept of Death; the historicism of the photographic image as a thing that has passed forces the possibility of death, which becomes inevitability in the sympathetic spectator. The photographic object occurs at one point and one point only, without reference to its progress within the passage of time, and that point is firmly rooted in the past, a period of "that-has-been". The spectator may wonder whether the photographic subject remains, but the possibility exists that it does not or has dramatically changed since its static image was captured. That possibility is enough to root Barthes' photograph in the awareness of Death and divide it from any sort of life of the present. The "that-has-been" cannot simultaneously be, except in the form of the image which can speak no further than the past existence of its object.

By the publication of Camera Lucida in 1980, photography was already played a significant role in both art and personal life, and yet since then, developments have occurred that Barthes could not possibly have anticipated. The foremost of these has been the ubiquity of the digital image, a phenomenon that with each advance further challenges the notion of the "that-has-been". The rampant spread of the digital camera, especially when correlated with expansions of Internet connectivity in public places and for non-standard devices, has led to an environment in which the photographic image can truly represent the instantaneous, the current, the up-to-date - the unmistakably living. There is no "that-has-been" when cell phone snapshots are uploaded to the Internet literally seconds after being taken; by the time these images have sufficiently faded into the background of the past as to cast Barthes' proverbial shadow of Death, they have almost certainly been replaced with others. The modern desk setup is as if a communications platform centered upon the image; without leaving one's chair, it is extraordinarily facile to create and transmit an immediate, living image that denies its own flatness and origin in the past. It is only necessary to to reach for a camera, snap a shot of the self or environment, plug the memory card into a convenient slot on their laptop, and send it on its way to a distant friend or loved one. These spontaneous creations of the image are often inspired by a conversation in another medium, removing even the short intermediary period between the recipient's sporadic glances at their inbox; rather, they are waiting when the image arrives, an image that has just been taken and is unmistakably a thing of the present. The punctum of these images is as much their immediacy as any visual element, for it denies these ingrained notions Barthes suggests of photography. The past as the realm of the photograph is not so strictly defined as to absolutely begin in mere seconds, minutes, or even hours back: although much can happen in this time, it is important to note that it very frequently does not. The photographic object is visually unchanged in these intervals, and this knowledge creates a blurring of the temporal dividing lines, allowing the digital photograph a place in the present, the land of the living and vital. It has not yet had time to take on the distancing reality of the photograph as history, to "have been"; it simply is, and in this it is a reminder of life and not the spectre of Death Barthes proposed - not a re-presentation of something finished but a presentation of something new.

Grizzly Man and the Punctum of Cinema

I found it a pleasant surprise that we were watching Grizzly Man this week in screening; I had wanted to view the film for quite a while, so it promised to be quite the departure from the horror of Weekend. After viewing the film, however, I took on a new understanding of Barthes's Camera Lucida as well. Barthes attempts to differentiate photography from cinema and, though he sticks by his distinction, admits that it is far from perfect. Grizzly Man, while it certainly does not follow classic Hollywood film structure, is a perfect example of this blurring of the lines between art forms.

Analyzing Grizzly Man as Barthes analyzes his photographs, it is easy to see the studium of the film and each scene - the intended, academic, somewhat indifferent analysis that the artist provides us. In this case, Treadwell wants the viewer to examine the bears, foxes, and general wildlife, not himself. Though he does not necessarily want the audience to gaze upon the situation in a detached state of mind, he does attempt to convince viewers with reason and according to a plan. He shows the grizzlies fighting, eating, surviving, and interacting with him in a non-aggressive manner, and he shows the foxes he plays with. In the impromptu moments that Herzog describes as the "magic of film", Treadwell attempts to show the more innocent side of the animals with the hope of reaching out to the viewer.

And though this approach is somewhat successful, a viewer of the film learns far less about these animals than he or she does about Treadwell himself. Treadwell, in his unplanned rants and numerous takes, reveals more about his own existence and his own desires than he likely realizes. The punctum of the footage, it could be argued, is Treadwell's battle with himself and his rejection of and by society. He talks about how much he prefers the beauty of nature to what he considers the menace of human society; he discusses his troubles with women numerous times and makes even more mention of his disdain for civilization as a whole. This is not what Treadwell, the "filmmaker" who recorded the majority of the movie, intended as his result - it is simply what stands out to his viewers, or at least, what stood out to me. (After all, the punctum is always subjective.)

There are other parallels that can be drawn between Grizzly Man and Barthes's analysis as well. When Barthes discusses gazing upon the photo of the boy who will be put to death, and the incredible meaning this adds to the image, the same can be applied to viewing Treadwell interacting with the bears that we know killed (and partially ingested) him. The link this highlights between cinema and death is clear and undeniable. And even when Barthes discusses the erotic photo, this same idea of the "blind field" is utilized by Herzog when he listens to the recording of Treadwell's death: the audience cannot hear what he does, but we cannot stop ourselves from imagining that which we cannot hear or see. Essentially, if there is one example to destroy Barthes's attempted distinction between film and photography, it is Grizzly Man.