Intersections Between Language and Photography

right.

after reviewing my research proposal (for history of photography) h made a comment regarding my choice of subject–something along the lines of it’s (the proposal) vague and rather philosophical. it is vague. i’m fleshing the idea out, or at least i was attempting to. now i’m hung up on, “it’s rather philosophical” (higgs). it is philosophical. after reading hirsch, it seems to me the entire history and evolution of photography and photographic processes is explained by philosophy.

but more than that, it is quite evident that the driving force behind photographic movements–photo secession, pictorialism, positivism, realism, spiritualism, i-need-a new-adjective-to-stand-out-from-the-crowdism–is vagary. What better way to define vagary than a series of rambling, philosophical discourses on why something evolved the way it did.

vagary as defined by dictionary.com:

the notion of meaning, outside and out of reach of photography–the meaning of meaning itself–is seductively subjective and viciously vague. to the point i believe meaning escapes concrete definition and, more importantly, any notion of absoluteness. these motions and movements in art are reducible to the most basest human motivation. right now i’m torn; is immortality or greed (however altruistic it may be) that underlying element?

insert complexity. and maybe irony. for, where immortality is concerned, the artist achieves this most notably through the continuation of their name. year after decade. but what is that name, really? insert signifier and signified and a barthes sized scoop of semiotics. without a likeness, be it a painted or photographed portrait, artistic immortality is nothing less than the ordering of symbols (letters) whose meaning is only as absolute as that long dead artist.

is it possible to grant one artistic immortality without their having reached for it? as my thoughts are at this time, i believe a sort of altruistic greed coupled with a need for self-expression that rises above all other self-expressers is the underlying element behind artistic movement.

please feel free to consider this an abstract expression in that I have reduced something to the point of recognizable simplicity, as have so many before me.

i’m off to contemplate what barthes meant when he said, “the bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

slr/10