Prelude: How Thandie got her wedding photographer!

The Bride. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

The story is great and coming here soon.

Down by Burden

Down by Burden. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

Ever felt that you had too much to do? Not being able to raise you head for a breath of fresh air? Or tend to your favourite blog as often as you would like to?

Well, in the meantime you need to look for additional connotations in this photograph. Is that ok with you? For the moment?

Stay tuned. Plenty of more posts to come And photographs.

Roland Barthes on Text and Image

I am going to continue a bit with Roland Barthes.

Not because his name is Roland Barthes, and since he already has made a name for himself within the broader field of communication. But for two other reasons. The first one being that the posts tagged “Barthes” seems to work pretty good on this blog, and secondly because he is central for the barebones themes in that he works with both verbal and visual communication.

A section in his famous article The Photographic Message is about Text and Image. Barebones want to make the points Barthes addresses, in that section, operational, and  show how they can be used both proactively when constructing a message e.g trying to communicate a thought, and reactively when deconstucting a message for e.g. analysis.

Barthes addresses three points in the combination of text and image. There are probably many more, but we will start with blog posts on these three:

1) Text as parasite to an image (post coming up)

2) Text as innocent to an image (post coming up)

3) Text as contradiction to an image (post coming up)

Even if the wording here is esoteric the content of what Barthes is saying is not that hard to grasp.

I will treat these three points/procedures in separate posts. Now you are warned. The separate posts on text and image will be linked to this introductory post.

And remember: reading blogs are not a substitute for reading books. And reading books are not a substitute for reading life. If you want to know more about Barthes, go get the book. If you want to know more about life, buy a camera.

You could start with the link below.

Library Thing. (Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, Fontana Press 1977, UK. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath).

For more posts on Roland Barthes go here.

Brief Tribute To A Red Car

 

Brief Tribute To A Red Car. Copyright 2008: Knut Skjærven.

 

Brief tribute to a red car.

Just  to remind you of  Roland Barthes’ connotation procedures.   His article from 1961 The Photographic Message tells the story. All but one, of his 6 procedures, have so far been treated on barebones. It you want to read the posts, you can start right at this page. Just follow the links.

1. Trick effects 

2. Pose 

3. Objects 

4. Photogenia 

5. Aestheticism 

6. Syntax 

Which reminds me that I have to write a post on his  ”syntax”, as well. Not forgotten. 

And while you are here: Don’t forget to listen to U2‘s No Line On The Horizon. The reviews haven’t been all that good, but listen to it a couple of times and I am sure you’ll get over it. Let you cruise over the horizon, indeed. In a red car. In a masterpiece.

Best cruiser from the album is Moment of Surrender.

Good luck with it. 

Library Thing. (Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, pages 15-31, Fontana Press 1977, UK. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath)

Obvious Obtuse

Obvious Obtuse. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

Roland Barthes had another flamboyant  idea. Analysing stills from another great master, the Russian Serge Eisenstein, he lacked a word for the meaning that was bluntly there.  So he invented a label for that kind of meaning. He called it obtuse: the blunt meaning. You can read all about it in his essay “The Third Meaning”, or you can read a bit about how others interpret it, by following this link. The article on obtuse meaning was originally written in the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1970.

As you clearly can see, the photograph above are embedded with obtuse meanings. Well, bluntly …. . You need to take a good look at the photograph, because as Barthes says, the obtuse meaning cannot be described. Good luck with it.

Picture shot at Lousiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark 2008.

Waiting Time

Here is another notebook brief for you. Comes in handy when I don’t have ready time to do more lengthy posts. 

Do you find that this photograph carries a strong and simple message? I do, but you don’t have to agree, of course. But if you do, what then are the semiological or other barebones tools, that carries this message thought? How do you explain the impact in terms of these tools?

Shot at Pierre Lachaise, Paris, France, some years ago. 

Stay alive. Good luck with it.

Waiting Time at Pierre Lachaise, Paris, France. All rights reserved.

Eyes Wide Open: Roadmap 2009.

Looking for the right direction to take in 2009?

At barebones communication, that is not a big deal since it has been advertised along the way. So, like the beach man, in the picture below, we are slightly turning our head, but keeping our body steadfast. Eyes wide open.

Beach Man, Spotorno, Italy.

1. The first year, barebones communication, has concentrated on cutting through the soft tissues of communication, and has tried to lay bare the bones that effects every real life acts of communication. There are still missing links in this work, and I will continue to fill in what is missing. Roughly this work will add to the themes that are already well established on the blog; semiology, phenomenology, gestalt psychology, naturalistic human sciences and types of experiential resources. These themes are the barebones pillars, and they will continue to play a crucial part of what is going to come on this blog.

2. I will continue the two more pedagogical threads: barebones pitstops, and the barebones notebook.

3. The turning of the head, however, means that I, to a larger extent, will put these things to practical use. Elaborating more on specific real life communication. You already find a hint of this direction reading some of the recent posts published. I am referring to the post on a Danish commercial, and the post on Canon and their black dots.

4. Last, but not least, I will continue using photographs to illustrate.

What you will see in 2009, then, is a mix of the above mentioned with eyes wide open particularly towards what I call real life communication. As a consequence you will see more of the newly introduced theme Barebones Orchid Scale (BOS).

phenomenology and photography

I have to admit that I had no clear idea of this from the beginning.

I have thousands of pictures and I have hundreds of books. So, my idea was initially to use both sources in combination on this blog.I started using pictures, because I thought they would brighten, and break up the blog a bit, and maybe, in some cases, make good illustrations for the verbal points made in the individual posts. Particularly in illustrating some of the gestalt factors the pictures came in handy, since some of them seemed to have been shot for the particular blog post.

Not so. The pictures you find on the blog are in some cases taken many years before a blog on barebones communication came to my mind about a year ago. My favourite post, in this respect, is the one on gestalt direction. Go look it up. The post “Wertheimer would have loved it”. This post, by the way, is one of the posts with the most hits. So, I must have done something right.

As I am the photographer of all the pictures posted, so far, I don’t have to worry about copyrights, since I hold copyrights to all the pictures. It makes life much easier that way, since I am allowed to quote from texts, but I am not allowed to quote from visual material in the same way. I can’t just post somebody else’s pictures.

However, lately, the thought grew on me that maybe my pictures had another role to play, as well. You are probably aware that, for instance, Roland Barthes have written with passion about photography. I am referring to his last book: La Chambre Claire, first published in France in 1980, the year of his untimely death.

I will return to that book in later post, since I fully agree with those stating that this book is one of the most important statements ever made on photography.

But what is more, it constitutes a cross section between semiology and phenomenology (Barthes explicitly refers to Edmund Hussels. Barthes states on page 20 in my copy of the English translation: Camera Lucida, that “In this investigation of Photography, I borrowed something from phenomenology’s project and something from its language”.

Barthes is talking about Edmund Husserl as his inpiration.

There is, however, even a much more important issue at stake here. You know that the phenomenological method includes a “freezing”, a “bracketing” of the natural attitude to be able to describe, and to study it more closely. Maybe you also are aware that one of the key methodological notions within phenomenology is the notion “perspective”.

Question: What is it I do, what is it that every photographer does, when taking or shooting pictures? Answer: Could be phrased this way: I/they/we, as photographers, freeze parts of the world from a certain perspective. That is the very nature of photography.

So, the cross over from photography to phenomenology, is rather obvious to make.

As the blog progressed, it slowly dawned on me, that here is a story that never has been told. I will try to tell it, bit by bit, as the blog unfolds. That was the general idea, anyway.

Think about this idea, and take a look at the picture submitted below: A moment, frozen in time, from a certain perspective. Phenomenological investigation illustrated. Photography on phenomenology. Feel free to re-read the posts on the phenomenological method already posted.

Gassin, France, 2002.

All the best to you as well

For more on the books mentioned, please go here: Library Thing: Roland Barthes: La Chambre Claire, and Library Thing: Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida (translated by Richard Howard).

For more posts on Barthes on this blog, go here, or use the tag cloud for navigation.

Iconic Sisters

Sometimes things turns out a little different. You get a bit more than you bargained for. At least a little more then you dared hope for. 

This can happen in every type of communication. In texts as well as in visuals. In other forms of communication as well, I would say. In commercial and non commercial communication 

We know that there are at least two levels involved in every act of communication. The first one being that content that we all can agree on. The manifest that is there for everyone to see. The horse in the field, the car on the road, the couple on the bench. This is the denotative level.

Second there is the connotative level. That overlay that always comes with denotations in the ways that denotations are presented to us. The horse that is running and connotes speed, the car that is broken and connotes damage, the people on the bench that sit close and connotes intimacy.

Are there levels beyond that. Ask Roland Barthes and he will say yes and point to at least one more level. He talks about an obtuse meaning as the third level. This is highly subjective and therefore hard to speak about in objective terms (I will have a specific post on that some other time). And Barthes even talks about a punctum as a specific item within a visual. The punctum attracts special attention.

Leave Barthes’ third meaning and his punctum aside in this post. The questions is then if there could be a third meaning other than that indicates by Barthes. I think thet there could be such an alternative third meaning. It occurs when the obvious meaning content of an image, or any other act of communication, transcends itself and move the spectator from specifics to generals. When the pair on the bench, the horse in the field and the car in the street contentwise moves beyond that of a specific pair, a specific horse and a specific car and tells a story of pairs, horses and cars in general. This is when you get that bit extra. Something more than you could hope to expect. 

I call this third level for the iconic level. Combine the word icon with that of notation and you will get icon + notation: iconnotation.

Let me show you a photograph to illustrate what I mean. It is a portrait of two sisters sitting on a bench (what coindence ).

As a picture of these sisters it is rather saying for those who know them. The more, however, I looked at the picture it took on an extra dimension. I know these people well, but the more I looked at the picture the sisters disappeared as people that I know, and took on a dimension on simply “sisters”. They could be any pair of sisters. The image turned into an icon for the notion sisters.

So here is the deal then. Pictures (let’s limit the discussion to that) consists at least of three possible levels of meaning:

1. Denotation, 2. Connotation, 3. Iconnotation

Do I hear you say that these two people does not have to be sisters? They could be anyone. Could just be friends. Well, that does not really of matter. The important thing is that their likenesses; both facial likeness and likeness of bodily position indicates strongly (connotes) they they have some kind of intimacy beyond sitting on the same bench. Right? So, if your prefer the picture be be an icon on intimacy, that would be quite ok with me. Please remark that hand that turns out behind the back of the right hand sister. It wraps up the ideas of intimacy very well, in my opinion.

Of course all of this can be contested. Please do. The good thing with blogs, however, are that they very seldom are contested.

Should I mention that denotations and connotations are default levels in all images, and all types of communication, and that iconnotations are not. The two first are a question of quantity and the latter a question of quality. As sloppy image will hardly ever aspire for iconic status, since e. g visual distractions will not likely help concentrating the message. Any message.

Stay tunes and I will return to that

Barthes’ Connotation Procedures 5: Aestheticism.

5. Aestheticism

Obscurity is not a world unknown to Barthes. Or to his readers or his critics.

Particularly if you want to venture into his world of photography. Barthes is famous for his article on the Third Meaning, that he wrote for the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma in 1970. Here he introduces the notion of the obtuse meaning of an image. Some would rather call this the obscure meaning of an image (I will handle this issue in a separate post).

I have to admit though, that already in 1961 when introducing his fifth connotation of aestheticism obscurity is present. To me it is, anyway.

Barthes states: “when photography turns painting, composition or visual substance treated with deliberation in its very material “texture”, it is either so as to signify itself as “art” (which was the case with the “pictorialism” of the beginning of the century) or to impose a general more subtle and complex signifier than would be possible with other connotation procedures”.

I’m am not sure what Barthes means with “a general more subtle and complex signifier”. So I am not in a position to be very helpful here. Sorry about that, but I urge you to pick up Barthes’ text directly, and tell me what this is all about. I will be more than happy to be educated here . How his connotation procedure of aestheticism can act as a mean of laying content into an photography, obscures me. Simple as that.

Here is an example of what I would call aestheticism in Barthes’ meaning “photography turns painting”. Or at least such a trial. This image, that is shot in Barthes’ own country, France, are overly saturated and filtered to make it look more like a painting than a photography.

Library Thing. (Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, pages 15-31, Fontana Press 1977, UK. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath).

Buy the English translation of Barthes’ work. Follow the link and support the site:
Image-Music-Text