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Week 9 – Specificities of the Medium: History and Theory

Updated: 22 hours ago

For week 9, we looked at the history and theory of photography. I did some research looking at how people read photographs. I researched Rolan Barthes, and in all of my research, I would end up at the same point in which Barthes’ mother died and he is looking for her photograph. He wants to “use the imaginative journey to speak about his mother’s death, to pin the meaning of her memory to a photograph” (Elkins). Images can often bring up trauma for people, reminding them of a bad past, or the grief following the death of a loved one. Whilst Barthes looked at his dead mothers photograph, it is simply “a trace, a remnant, of the person who was there” (Olin).

When looking at how images can cause emotional pain, you might think about how at a funeral, images showing the deceased’s life would be shown; or how when a disaster occurs, news articles about it will feature photographs. This can come back to the people affected and cause that trauma to resurface.  This happened to Stephen Bleyer, who, 49 years after the end of the second world war, found a photo album in a bookshop, showing images from Russian archives of the holocaust. Bleyer looked through the images, only to be met with an image of a young boy, whom he didn’t recognise, yet this boy had the same number tattooed on his forearm as Bleyer did. Bleyer was “seeing himself as he had never been able to see himself in the camp” (Widoger) and re-living this trauma.

This same argument that photographs can cause emotional distress, is also true in the opposite. The lack of photographs of an event can cause the same distress. Phil Lee looked at a group of photographers who tried to create a project looking at the Korean war, “they received education under the Park Chung Hee regime, which focused on the liquidation of remnants of the colonial period and the anti-Communist ideology while at home, witnessed the memory and mourning of their grandparents and parents.” (Lee) While these ‘new generation’ photographers look into their families’ pain, not able to truly understand why, they took these matters into their own hands to research the war, and learn ways to represent it within their work. One example is Anna Lin, whose “work suggests that the way the Korean War is remembered in contemporary South Korean society is ambivalent. Her photos of war weapons depict two conflicting situations” (Lee)

Although there are infinite reasons to look at photographs, and infinite ways to read an image; emotional trauma is a big part of how people read photography, and why people keep photographs.

This week also marks the beginning of the final project, in which I have decided to look at interactive exhibitions, with a focus on landscape photography. There are multiple elements to this, including the relationship between sound and image, which has been described to have “a relationship to something like stillness or immersion” (Carlyle 2016). Looking at how this will be exhibited, the online exhibition has gained popularity since the pandemic, for the simple reason that “the online show has some fundamental benefits: it offers a reach that a physical exhibition can not.” (Duzant, 2020). For the images themselves I am hoping to have landscape images that can provoke emotion for an audience, as “when viewers look at your work, their hearts should jump. You want them to feel the same emotions that you felt, standing in the middle of nature and bringing back something amazing.” (Mansurov, 2020)

For the basic layout of how this will work, I came up with a diagram, where each arrow depicts a mouse click:

I am hoping that this project will have large connotations for accessibility, as well as being able to convey the emotions that I felt whilst out on walks.

References:

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