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On the nature of the studium: In his subjective examination of multiple photographs, Barthes describes the duality created by the “co-presence” of the studium and the punctum. The studium is coded, and can be understood as the rhetorical meaning of the photograph. On the nature of the punctum The punctum is a sudden ‘prick’ when … Continue reading
Hirsch opens her introductory chapter with an overview of some of the key points Roland Barthes makes in a section of Camera Lucida wherein a photograph of Barthes’ mother as a child is “read” by Barthes; this description of a photograph is what Hirsch calls an “imagetext” (10). When one looks at and is “looked … Continue reading
Agency How does an author “writing back” to hegemonic institutions/dominant narratives allow her to gain agency? Audience/Addressee Who does the text address; are there multiple audiences? What kind of reader does the text ask you to be? Authority/Authenticity Is the narrator authoritative? Does the narrator defer to an established authority figure to give clout to … Continue reading
Taking the stance that photographs are “weapons in an ideological struggle” (15), Rugg argues that photography, like autobiography, allows its subjects a kind of control over perceptions of selfhood both privately and publicly. We tend to understand photographs as a special kind of sign, believed to have a more realistic relationship towards between signified and … Continue reading
In an effort to uncover more layers of meaning in people’s selfie-taking practices, Sophia, Alexandra and myself searched #selfie on Instagram to explore the types of shots that people categorize under the term. Selfie-taking is worth critically exploring because it has become such a pervasive practice. While there are more than 224 million photographs categorized … Continue reading
The Getty Museum YouTube series and the Allversity lecture on the history of photography both touch on the history of the daguerreotype, focusing on its role in the canon of photography as well as the technical aspects of producing these silver-faced copper plates. The daguerreotype process is a method of image capturing that places an … Continue reading
“Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” –Susan Sontag, On Photography In “Melancholy Objects”, one of many essays featured in her 1977 collection On Photography, Sontag analyzes the photograph as a cultural and historic object to establish distinct ideological and ontological paradigms between American and European photography. Despite these aesthetic and philosophical distinctions across time and … Continue reading
The chapter, “Portrait Path” in Risto Sarvas and David M. Frohlich’s From Snapshots to Social Media – The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography traces the history of early photography from the 1803s to the 1890s. Over this period, photo technology evolved to suit consumer demands and allow for new affordances, but also reflects current trends … Continue reading
The beginning of the article explains how collodion wet plates were replaced by dry plates in 1871 which made it possible to mass produce the plates and sell them pre-processed. George Eastman however saw there was no monopoly potential in dry plates and was set out to invent a complete system of roll film, roll … Continue reading
Rhetoric of the Digital Image 