Essay by Sandra Kemp

30Nov06

In researching the texts I plan to discuss for my final paper, I came across this essay by Sandra Kemp entitled “‘Myra, Myra on the wall’: The fascination of faces.” In it, Kemp discusses image, identity, and desire in relation to photography. She analyzes several literary texts, including Camera Lucia and [...]

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Forgotten Summer

15Nov06

Callie  
While reading both Calvino and Barthes’ thoughts on photography, I began seeing photography as an intrusion.  I had always thought that photography captured moments to be remembered forever, but the more I read the more confused I became about my stance on photography.  Barthes writes that photography is not actually capturing a moment, but killing [...]

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Love and the Lens

14Nov06

One of the most engaging ways to read a piece of literature is to discover connections and differences between yourself and a character.  One theme that quickly emerges is the power of one’s love for a parent. This is where the camera comes in, as it is photography that can eternalize a loved one. To accentuate [...]

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Confession: I Killed a Man

14Nov06

“The photograph is like old age: even in its splendor, it disincarnates the face, manifests its genetic essence.”
-Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida

Upon reading this quote, I thought of a photograph that I took about a year ago on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. An old man [...]

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Why would you take a picture of that?

14Nov06

Tom D.
“This fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves photography in the vast disorder of objects-of all the objects in the world: why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other? Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurrences;”
-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
By: CaptainQuerty
 
The photograph [...]

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Born A Slave

14Nov06

Upon finishing Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, I was left unsatisfied. Barthes is not only wordy, but he is also giving “expert information” on a subject that he merely is opinionated about. He can never decide what photography actually is because he constantly has to polarize his answers. For example, Barthes states “Such are [...]

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Triggered Memory

14Nov06

By: Chelsey R.
“One of the first instincts of parents, after they have brought a child into the world, is to photograph it.  Given the speed of growth, it becomes necessary to photograph the child often, because nothing is more fleeting and unmemorable than a six-month-old infant, soon deleted and replaced by one of eight months…”
-Italo [...]

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14Nov06

-Beth P.
 
“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
– Barthes, Camera Lucida (Pg 4)

I chose the above quote from Camera Lucida because, out of the whole of the novel, this line, barely four pagesin, stuck out in my mind strongest. On [...]

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Only Once

14Nov06

Shua
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
               -     Barthes Camera Lucida 4

Photo by: mere poppins
A seed blossoms into a flower only once. It flourishes while alive and withers away to nothingness once its time is up. Of course the following season, a flower [...]

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Take a Picture it Lasts Longer

13Nov06

By: Madeline 
“Having exhausted every possibility, at the moment when he was coming full circle Antonino realized that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left-or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all the time.”
 
-Calvino “The Adventures of a Photographer” 186 
This photograph was taken by Ansel Adams. He is a photographer [...]

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