It was an interesting lecture as I got to question photographs - what is really happening in the image?
I learnt how meaning is constructed by deconstructing the different elements of an image into different parts
- we are surrounded by images from the media and we are constantly bombarded by them but we are also surrounded by images, representations and communication that don't really enter our conscious thoughts such as when we walk down the road
- All Photography is made up of signs, and semiotics is the 'science' behind how those signs create meaning
Therefore to understand the 'science of signs' is to understand how photographs communicate meaning.
Plato - believed that words do not name actual things. Since to name things would require an individual name, things would require an individual name for each individual thing.
(each dog would require a different name to reflect to signify its individuality)
For Plato, words were ideas and concepts derived from essences of things - whereby there is a perfect, platonic idea of the concept.
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To broaden my mind on the topic, I looked at artist Jeff Wall and his work of narrative+semiotics
This image questions what is actually happening in the moment...
Despite this studied approach, his work generally feels almost improvisational. Take, for example, the following photograph. It has a photojournalistic ambience…an unscripted street scene in which a man displays his racism. The street is nondescript; it could be any street in any North American city. The racism is as casual and nonchalant as it is evil, using an obscene gesture to 'slant' his eye; it’s the unthinking banality of the racism that makes it both common and pervasive and all the more quietly pernicious. The people involved are ordinary people from slightly different social classes, yet there is a definite class component to the underlying resentment and racism. It looks like a moment captured in time. And it was completely staged.
Wall stated that he’d seen an incident like this take place as he walked along the street in Vancouver. He decided to recreate the scene…but as a work of social art. He hired actors to be his subjects, he found the perfect nondescript street, he set up lights and the tripod for his large format camera. He selected the costumes the subjects wore. He directed the way the actors moved, the way the racist drags his girlfriend forward, the way she squints in unconscious mimicry, the aggressive stare of the racist, the quiet anger of the Asian man. He wanted the photograph to be more real than the incident itself.
He even recreates the work of painters he believes met Baudelaire’s standard. For example, Wall is quite taken with the woodcuts of Hokusai, a Japanese artist who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century. In the following woodcut, Hokusai depicted a sort of Cartier-Bresson moment…a decisive moment.
Wall recreated the scene on a cranberry farm in rural Canada. In keeping with his obsessive, directorial style, he staged the photograph with great care. He selected the location to match Hokusai’s wind-bent trees. He had the subjects crouch and hold their hats similar to Hokusai’s. He recreated the hat that was blown away, and the scattering of papers. And yet he made it a completely contemporary image by setting it in a Canadian landscape and including the line of telephone poles.
Wall’s photo has all the drama and spontaneity of Hokusai’s woodcut. There is a wonderful sense of immediacy and tension. How was he able to create such an atmosphere and still reproduce Hokusai’s image so faithfully? By using the magic of digital imagery. Wall’s image is actually a composite of more than 100 separate photographs taken over two winters.
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