A Haunting Loss

Posted on April 17, 2012 by institute

I remember the first time I held a W. G. Sebald book in my hand. Yes, I felt the weight of the late author’s words but I soon felt another more overwhelming sensation – a feeling of utter joy and freedom – brought on by the odd collection of images that dotted that book’s pages. I knew from that moment on that my activities as an artist would be radically changed. And they were.

Recently I had another ‘lightbulb’ moment brought on by a series of photographs although the ramifications of my interchange still remain unknown, mysterious and even confounding.  For how do I reconcile a stack of photos, buried in a pristine world of primal snow for almost 30 years that where then smuggled back into culture carrying a story that had no source, with the archive that is growing around the Barthes project – a collection of photos born in the wool suit, cigarette soaked histories of Europe’s saddest (and most recent) century?

I don’t know.

For now, the lure of these images is strong, so strong that I’ve already canceled my plans to go to Documenta this summer, so that I can visit a small museum in Sweden that holds the photo archive of the doomed Andrée expedition.

On some level these images DO dialogue with Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Both projects deal with a quest and a photography called to extraordinary duty. But maybe I don’t want to figure it out – not yet. For now I’m happy the ICI- IFP (Interpretive Field Project) that will fuel our Barthes publication has found me and that our destination will be a place my ancestors once called home.

 

 

 

 

 

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Research Group forming for Barthes’ Tear

Posted on November 20, 2011 by institute

We are beginning to form the research group for Barthes’ Tear. One of the trajectories we hope to explore is Barthes’ trove of  ’hidden images,’ the photographs he discusses but never reproduces in Camera Lucida. Pictured here is Duane Michaels portrait of Andy Warhol, one of the photographic phantoms in Barthes’ book.

Read more about the research group on on our news blog.

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A “troumatic” photo archive

Posted on September 13, 2011 by institute

While trolling the Internet during a session of armchair fieldwork, I found a wonderful archive of images with battered and tattered ‘visual testaments’ to the undeniable link between the surface of the photographic print and the human body. The words I might use to describe the top layer of each of these photographic prints are the same terms I would employ to characterize variations in human skin: mottled, punctured, scarred, faded, scratched, stained, thin, discolored, and even dead. I am particularly drawn to the images with distorted edges that appear to have suffered some internal disaster like the sudden shift of an undiscovered seismic plate in aged paper or a hole seemingly burnt into the surface of an image by a liquid fire that laid in wait inside the paper’s fibrous threads.

Hal Foster, borrowing from Lacan, might call these surface ruptures – ‘troumatic’ (trou=hole).  They do not belong to the realm of Barthes’ punctum—a ‘prick,’ personal and individual that relies on the ‘story’ of the photo and the viewer. No, these ‘eruptions of the real,’  resist a singular narrative  And yet, the recurring bites, scratches, tears,  and burns, are visually shared; they pull the reader into a communal realm of unknowing.

Troumatic photo: torn house

Troumatic photo: folded photo

Troumatic photo: scratched photo

Troumatic photo: bitten photo

Even though these types of  troumatic ruptures are absent (for the most part) in the images Barthes gives us in his Camera Lucida, in Barthes’ Tear I hope to show how these pops and fissures inhabit the book in the gaps between word and text.

Next time…the phantom photo archives in Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

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Camera Lucida as a field guide

Posted on August 7, 2011 by institute

 

We’ve been thinking of Camera Lucida as a field guide:

  • to photography
  • to Barthes
  • to culture
  • to the Internet
  • to Barthes on the Internet
  • to photography on the Internet

Yes, as the second part of this list attests, this project has already veered into virtual spaces spurred on, no doubt, by the wealth of writing on the Internet about Barthes and Camera Lucida.

For months now, in casual conversation and even in more formal talks, we have summarized Barthes’ last book as a “field guide to photography.” Now this sound bite, this emissary of the imaginary, must be reckoned with. For we have found that most casual asides are gifts from a place both deep inside and far outside us—cultural calling cards that have been slipped into the liminal space between an edifice and a closed door.

If we begin by interrogating our list of terms, the first two—field and guide— would demand the entire summer. A field can be a discipline, an expanse of nature, a vague answer to an unwanted question. A guide can be a how-to manual, a sign in the road or even a link to the spirit world. Each of these terms are relevant to Camera Lucida and for each we can imagine the unique path it would forge through our nascent book.

If each nuance of these two words conjures up a unique solo, a symphony of propositions results when they are joined into a single term. A field guide can be a journal of casual recordings or a formalized report that follows a discipline’s canonical template. For both, the document is linked to ‘itinerary,’ a commonality that resonated with our own approach to Barthes’ book. The template of a field guide captures our desire to “travel” to Camera Lucida, to document its flora and fauna, its architecture, its rules, and its culture. To wander down its cul-de-sacs and dead ends, to ferret out the infamous and the forgotten, even as we celebrate the book’s cherished towers and shake hands with its local heroes, with figures in shadows, with the dead.

All this before we tackle ‘photography.’

We’ll report next from the field.

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Choosing a Title

Posted on April 23, 2011 by institute

The title for this book came to us fast and easy. We knew it was going to be another project in our “eye” series and that it would follow the formula we had devised for this group of books: take the last name of the author whose work we are to interrogate and follow it by a related “eye” term. Given Barthes’ lament for his dead mother in Camera Lucida, we knew right away that our eye term would be “tear.” And certainly we loved the ambiguity – was ‘tear’  a verb or a noun, a word linked to sadness or one that hinted at a need for restraint or repair. The template for an entire book began to emerge from this simple title but also a new tradition here at the ICI. For now, as we still try to figure out what the project wants to be (instead of what we want it to be), it will be the hand not the mouth that announces the book’s title:

And yes, there is no additional -s- after the apostrophe that follows Barthes name.

Don’t get us started…

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