the Winter Garden Photograph

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page 67:

28.

There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.

The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing, along which he had extended one arm; she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera; you could tell that the photographer had said, "Step forward a little so we can see you"; she was holding one finger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of their parents, who were soon to divorce, had posed side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house where my mother was born, in Chennevieres-sur-Marne).

I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup -- all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence (if you will take this word according to its etymology, which is:"I do no harm"),all this had transformed the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness. In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly--in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single "observation." This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy - justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.

For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced in one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother's true face, "whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory." The unknown photographer of Chennevieres-sur-Marne had been the mediator of a truth, as much as Nadar making of his mother (or of his wife - no one knows for certain) one of the loveliest photograph in the world; he had produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer. Or again (for I am trying to express this truth) this Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Fruehe which accords with both my mother's being and my grief at her death, I could not express this accord except by an infinite series of adjectives, which I omit, convinced however that this photograph collected all the possible predicates from which my mother's being was constituted and whose suppression or partial alteration, conversely, had sent me back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsatisfied. These same photographs, which phenomenology would call "ordinary" objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.


好一个感伤的巴特。我发现一个用感觉多过术语来写作的人，要向巴特先生学习如何热情地推销自创的词汇。
就像那些涂鸦的年轻人一样。还要准备古典音乐，培养高尚的感情。
bonus -- 原来Nadar有很多轶事。他是最早用人造光拍照的摄影师，他把自己的工作室借给印象派画家使用，促成第一届印象主义画展，他还是最早作高空摄影的人。了不起，了不起。

To Paint

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics

Page30:

13.
The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niepce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting (Mapplethorpe represents an iris stalk the way an Oriental painter might have done it); it has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas (this is true, technically, but only in part; for the painters' camera obscura is only one of the causes of Photography; the essential one, perhaps, was the chemical discovery). At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting. "Pictorialism" is only an exaggeration of what the Photograph thinks of itself.

Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theater animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.



不是很喜欢罗兰巴特的笔调。大概法国人都是这样的。自言自语。感伤有余。我仿佛见到一个面对大海，悠然叹息的男子，他喜欢说话，穿柔软质地的衣服和皮鞋。他不会让我感兴趣，我不会喜欢听他说话，我宁可听海。

这第13小章题为‘作画’，但忽悠忽悠就把化学反应、剧场、时间、角度、死亡的名字都点了一遍。好像提起死亡就会很有深度……虽然我有时也有这样的倾向。

‘化学反应’倒是提醒我可以介绍seib早期的摄影绘画作品。

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes

Contents


Part One

1. Specialty of the Phtograph
2. The Photograph Unclassifiable
3. Emotion as Departure
4. OPERATOR, SPECTRUM and SPECTATOR
5. He Who is Photographed
6. The SPECTATOR: Chaos of Tastes
7. Photography as Adventure
8. A Casual Phenomenology
9. Duality
10. STUDIUM and PUNCTUM
11. Studium
12. To Inform
13. To Paint
14. To Surprise
15. To Signify
16. To Waken Desire
17. The Unary Photograph
18. Co-presence of the Studium and the Punctum
19. PUNCTUM: Partial Feature
20. Involuntary Feature
21. Satori
22. After-the-Fact and Silence
23. Blind Field
24. Palinode


Part Two

25. "One evening . . ."
26. History as Separation
27. To Recognize
28. The Winter Garden Photograph
29. The Little Girl
30. Ariadne
31. The Family, the Mother
32. "THAT-HAS BEEN"
33. The Pose
34. The Luminous Rays, Color
35. Amazement
36. Authentication
37. Stasis
38. Flat Death
39. Time as PUNCTUM
40. Private / Public
41. To Scrutinize
42. Resemblance
43. Lineage
44. CAMERA LUCIDA
45. The "Air"
46. The Look
47. Madness, Pity
48. The Photograph Tamed

抄寫有用

實踐抄寫。

Stenberg Brothers

MoMA exhibition of Stenberg Brothers back in 1997 offers some good summaries in the introduction.

INKhUK (INstitut KHUdozhestvennoy Kultury, or institute of artistic culture). Active: 1921-24.

There was a shift from the illustrator-as-creator to the constructor-as-creator or nonlinear-narrator-as-creator. In the visual language of the constructor or Constructivist, the Stenbergs and other graphic designers and artists assembled images, such as portions of photographs and preprinted paper, that had been created by others. Thus, the Stenbergs and others realized wholly new images (or compositions) which were no longer about realism. Hence, graphic design as a modern expression eschewing traditional fine art was born in the form of the printed reproductions of collage or assemblage.

Source: Wiki.

Some good sites to read more:
http://greenlanddesign.org/coleg/
Russian Constructivism
Kinofilm
Russo Graphica
Sinead Lau's blog