Another way of telling
John Berger - Jean Mohr
published 1989
printed GB by Butler + Tanner Ltd, Frome and London
Contents: Preface - Beyond my camera - Appearances - if each time... - stories - beginning
Preface
What is a photograph
What do photographs mean?
How can they be used?
"A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often more contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image." p7
Beyond my camera - by jean mohr
What are you doing there? pictures of men and their cattle. taking pictures without paying or permission
The stranger who imitated animals... blind girl will never see the photos he took of her
Marcel or the right to choose has herd of 50 cows at 1500 feet. He liked best the photos which gave him the best pleasure in life, his herd, grandson, dog.
chose how he was to be portrayed once in kitchen ' and now my grandchildren will know what sort of man I was.' p37
self-portrait accept the embarassment of photos that others have taken of you, to understand better others
disguised face, moving camera etc, rejection of the image
Film called A Photographer Among Men, made by Claude Goretta (cure for play acting)
"The man whom I saw before me existed with all his weaknesses. He was real, and in a sense he was beyond my control. I was no longer responsible for his appearances."p39
remark on Bohrs portrait - In this light your face reminds me a little of Samuel Beckett's"
What did I see? Feel need to tell a story with his photographs, photograph never self-sufficient p42
Comparisons with what others thought a photograph meant and what was actually happening. No-one was correct. Highlights the ambiguity.
A framed portrait of a woodcutter asked by woman to have a picture of husban if killed
A doubtful exorcism Djakarta - children running for train
No Scoop Yugoslavia
The subject not photographed to take or not to take? p78
fear sometimes can stop you taking photographs
many reasons, unless press - none are valid (exscuses)
favour of a moment in memory than a photograph
Appearances by John Berger (culmination of years of work)
photographs to accompany love poems p83
"photography is still, first and foremost for me a means of expression." p83
possible relations between images and text?
"Faced with the problem of communicating experience, through a constant trial and error, we found ourselves having to doubt or reject many of the assumptions usually made about photography. We discovered that photographs did not work as we had been taught" p84
I guss this has more to do with the interpretation of an image if it is trial and error in the itnerprettting process if we have an image that is devoid of context
The ambiguity of the photograph
It seems this will bear more impact with the person reading a photograph... and perhaps not as relevant to my representation definition as I would hope....
game of inventing meanings when approached with a photoraph
photograph offers irrefutable evidence that something there once existed [example given is the man + horse] yet tells us nothing significant of their existence p86
" a photographs arrests the flow of time in which the event photographed once existed. All photographs are of the past, yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present. Every photograph presents us with two messages: a message concerning the event photographed and another concerning a shock of discontinuity. " p86
" between the moment recorded and the present moment of looking at the photograph there is an abyss. "
TWO MESSAGES PRESENTED
-the event occured
-the shock of discontinuity (time between shooting + seeing)
So here, we have the gap that is presented with us that is at the core of representation... things are always of the past which we have to keep in mind when looking at images, we need a certain proficiency level of udnerstanding when looking at things so we can truly interpret them.
If the person is a stranger then we only care about the first message - the event photograhed. If they were our lover, who had died we would become aware of a shock of discontinutity
photographs preserved the look of things
photographs - stimulus to action - such as sexual arousal
ambiguity arises not from the first message but from the second, the disconinuty from the moment recorded and the moment of looking p89
"a photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being affaced by the supersession of further moments. In this respect photographs might be compared to images stored in the memory. Yet there is a fundamental difference: whereas remembered images are the residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant. " p89
likening the photograph to a computer, it is us who gives meaning to something that the computer spits out, not a computer, the same can be said of how humans interact with a photograph
"When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and future" p89
-the photographer tries to lend an appropriate suggested future/past for his image
the photograph compared with other means of communication is weak therefore in intentionality p90
depend on captions
"All photographs are ambiguous " p 91
disconinuity always produces ambiguity, sometimes not obvious.
photograph beg for an interpretation, which words usually supply
Okay this seems to more support the context driven thing that I wish to end my dissertation in... hmm I may be getting muddled here in exactly what I want to be getting out of this
The photograph, irrefutible as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words
POWERFUL TOGETHER
"could this ambiguity suggest another way of telling?"
representation "is indeed like a trace" p93
'the material relation between the image and what it represents (between the marks on the printing paper and the tree these marks represent) is an immediate and unconstructed one' p93 b4
photographs has a few choices, but cannot intervene with the light
clarify what we mean by trace,
drawing is a translation
"each mark is conciously related"
"a painted image is woven together by the energy of countless judgements" p93
More related to the V gogh chapter
Difference between making + recieving also implies a very different relation to time p95
more time may be dovted to a sky, than a face which has a lot more detail to it
"But every drawing , in order to re-recreate appearancves, has recource to a language' p95
photogtaphy possesses no such language
"photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them'
quotes rather than translates
it i said that the camer cannot lie, it cannot it prints directly p96
The photograph presents us with something that would happen in the real world surely?
We are presented with visual information and our brain tries to make sense of it, connections because that is what is human for us to do....
and we take in the all other visual information, presented etc to try and come to a meaning whether it's something from memory or something from the surrounding it all helps us in the interpretation of something or an event it's just that we have a longer time to percieve it than something that is in a constant state of perpetual change and moment like the linear view of time we live through
faked photographs = proof, can only make a photograph tell a lie by tampering with it
but can be used massively to decieve and misinform p96
"in itself the photograph cannot lie, but, by the same token, it cannot tell the truth; or rather, the truth it does tell , the truth it can by itself defend is a limited one."
photographs used in science and medicine - truth/ evidence
-A popular use of photography-
-a red hussar leaving
reading into a photograph can be done on many levels, and knowing more details about a certain time or period seems to enhance the details and assumptions and insinuations that can be made
The enigma of appearances
Two different uses of photography
-idealogical - positive aspect of the photograph,
-private use - cherishes, subjective feeing
art being considered as an art
how can photographs of unknown subjects move us?
if they don't function like paintings how do they function?
Difference between painting and photography here, can work this in between v.gogh + Coplan/sherman chapter
-argued that photographs quote from appearances p111 goes on to clarify
Following on from Barthes "Each time when having gone a little way with a language, I have felt that its system consists in, and in that way is slipping towards, a kind of reductionism and disapproval, I have quietly left and looked elsewhere"
----> they would say, Berger relied on semiological systems in the Hussar picture, sign language of clothes, expressions/body gestures etc...
>>>These do not exaust or begin to cover all that can be read in appearances p112
appearances may constitute a language
appearances can cohere - grass grows like hair / walnuts like brain in skull / shell ETC
2nd degree cohere - visual imitation can begin, butterflies with eyes like an owl
apperances both distinguish and join events p 113
appearances cohere with perception
sight of things cohere to other events
to recognise an appearance it requires the memory of other appearances. (memories) p113
appearances possess some qualities of a code 114-115
if maintaining that appearances resemble languahge - difficulties, universals??? implied encoder, who wrote them??? p115
p116 - 'it was a rationalist illusion to beleive that in dispensing with religion, mysteries would be reduced. What has happened, on the contrary, is that mysteries multiply. Merleau-Ponty wrote:'
We must take literally what vision teaches us, namely that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere... borrows from vision nd employs means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior", foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaniety"; this is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. """"
philosophially - enigma but we cannot look away from this problem...
we can only imagine we are elsewhere because of vision and we cannot do it without.
reading become sread becomes expressive,
"In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning. This expectation should be distinguished from a desire for an explanation. The one who looks may explain aftewards; but, prior to any explanation, there is the expectation of what appearances themselves may be about to reveal." p117
So this may be instinctual... we can help but make assumptions? free from reasons and time to think + debate and to make connections in our minds.
revelation - not come easily p118
appearances are oracular
like oracles they g beyond, insinuate further than the discrete phenomena they preset.
"The one who looks is essential to the meaning found, and yet can be surpassed by it. and this surpassing is what is hoped for" p118
A photograph quotes from appearances but, in quoting simplifies them." p119
THE DIAGRAM:
In life, an event develops through time, the duration allows its meaning to be percieved + felt.
The event moves towards or through its meaning...
--------------->
Photography arrests this flow, and makes the photograph ambiguous
----------|-------->
The movement is hypothesiesd a past and future to allow movement through time
the line is a cross section of the event
----------o------>
stranger
-------( )----->
know them
suggest other events
implicates other events
Hegel defining individuality: p122
'Every self -conciousness knows itself 1) as universal, as the potentiality of abstracting from everything determinate, and 2) as particular, with a determinate object, content and aim. Still, both these moments are only abstractions: what is concrete and true (and everything true is concrete) is the universiality which has the particular as its opposite, but the particular which by its reflection into itself has been equalised with the universal. This inity is indivudiality.'
"We think or feel or remember through the appearances recorded in the photograph, and with the idea of lidibility/illegibility which was instagated by them" p124
"one sees how a photograph's lack of intentionality becomes its strength, its lucidity" p125
Perhaps this is an extreme example for me of the photogtaph having its intention I would like to assume perhaps that photographs have a certain contextual element to them
Sumarry
Photographs quote from appearances
taking out of the quotation (context) = discontinuity ... ambiguity
public, used for truth or to decieve
expressive photograph, extension of meaning, using discontinuity to an ADVANTAGE
narration is broken
allows to find a coherance - instigats ideas
half language
IF EACH TIME... photos by jean mohr, narrated by berger + mohr
"In themselves appearances are ambiguous, with multiplemmeanings. This is why the visual is astonishing and why memory, based upon the visual, is freer than reason" p133
interesting series of images, texture of wool and knitted things, homely, farmlike, old, animals, work job carer mother all these things implied from a coherance of imagery.
STORIES
by john berger
constructing with sequences of images
such as the reported photo-story
usually about what the photographer saw at location Y not their experience of it
photograph you search for what's there, film you get it next in sequence
no words redeem the ambiguity of the prev images
no storyline
can do this with sentences, pretend sentences are photographs, put two together and a story is formed/
stars need to be seen as constellations
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
Another way of telling
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