Not sure, John, you might need to check the metadata on the image.
On 9/26/11 1:25 PM, John Palcewski wrote:
The profession's dying. The need for it is dying. Maybe it was never of
any value in the first place. "Professional".... hahahaaaa.... what are
we, brain surgeons?
Sometimes it’s good to go back and look at how Stieglitz and others
fought to have photography elevated from a technical craft to high
art, which required a lot of persuasion and convoluted rhetoric, which
continues to this day.
Here’s something I ran across just yesterday. It’s an essay entitled
“Erased Physiognomy: Theodore Gericault, Paul Strand and Garry
Winogrand,� by Dr. Stephen Bann, Professor of Modern Cultural Studies
and Chairman of the Board of Studies in History and Theory of Art at
the University of Kent, east of London.
“Roland Barthes has expressed with memorable concreteness the terms of
the ‘anthropological revolution’ of photography which resulted in the
establishment of a new type of visual communication. The photograph
is, for Barthes, a ‘message without a doce’, and this implies the
corollary that other types of images (and typically those in the
tradition of Western painting since the Renaissance) are inevitably
and irretrievably coded. Despite all that has been said about the
coded character of photographic communication, Barthes’ point remains
valid on a level which is not merely that of a truism. The photograph
has, by virtue of its ontological status, the character of a document,
whether it is a vehicle for codes, or whether it subverts them: its
status as a trace, or in Peirce’s terms an index, implies a level of
meaning that communicates irrespective of the photographer’s
contrivance.�
Now I have lost a lot of sleep at night anxiously wondering if my
photographic documents are a vehicle for codes, or if they instead
subvert them. I’m sure many of you out there are struggling mightily
with the same issue.
