Art as Experiance

In our first week of Contemporary Photography Seminar: Theory, Criticism, and Practice we were given five readings, with the overarching idea of Art as Experience. Our readings consisted of Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, "The Future of the Image" by Jacques Rancierre, excerpts from The Practice of Everyday Life by Mihel de Certeau, Allan Kaprow's writings from Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings, and "How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction" by Andrea Fraser.


Within these readings I found a common thread pertaining to what is necessary to create a work of art and what role photography specifically takes within the world of art. Each reading underlined a need for our experience, an engagement, and our active participation with a work to art as active creator and as a viewer to decipher what it means to create a work of art. There must be a conscious intention in what we create as well as a need to investigate, as a spectator, the image and come to discover an "Other" (as Rancierre discusses) that speaks in volumes greater than what we can physically see. Photography is an excellent example of how this works because it is, at it's birth, arguably a direct depiction of reality and must therefore transcend what we understand and know of the subject (person, place, thing, time, culture, society, race, etc.) into an "Other." "Photography became an art by placing its particular techniques in the service of this dual poetics, by making the face of anonymous people speak twice over--as silent witness of a condition inscribed directly on their features, their clothes, their life setting; and as possessors of a secret we shall never know [..]" (Rancierre, 15) A photograph, made for the purposes of art, must then move beyond what we can see on the flat service of a piece of photographic paper into the unseen and to the implications that we place upon it by actively viewing the image.

For my own example I have selected an image, The Necklace, 1999, from Alessandra Sanguinetti's body of work "The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams." Utilizing Roland Barthe's method of looking at photographs in his book Camera Lucida, in accordance with my previous ideas of how an artistic photograph is made, I must first come to grips with what is physically in the image, it's "reality," the studium or appreciation to the objects, people, place, etc. present within the photograph. This is a photograph of two young girls, roughly around the same age, who share a relationship of some sort, whether that be of sisterhood or of friendship. They appear to be of a particular ethnicity (Hispanic) from a particular geographical area (South America), and have parents of a similar economic class (Working). I can also continue to journey into the photograph by studying the quality of light (late afternoon/ early evening) which gives the image a specific frame in time. What they wear (the plastic jewelry, the patterns on their dresses, etc.) and their physical features let us know that this photograph takes place in contemporary time. Their gestures and interaction would lead us to believe that an intimate moment is being shared, either through conversation or through "play-acting" or "dress-up." At this level of scuntity the photograph is interesting and engaging as many photographs are because of their ability to capture time and encapsulate a moment that has past and can never be lived through again. But, it is the punctum; the sting, wound, little hole that leaves its permanent bruise and impression upon the viewer and allows an image to transcend itself into the "Other" (that which is outside of reality). The punctum is a detail that is essentially subjective, it can be different for every different person who is actively viewing an image, but the affect is the same. The punctum for me is as the title suggests, the necklace. I can feel the texture of those particular beads around my neck, between my fingers, and instantly I am transported into a stillness, a moment and memory where an emotion I cannot place bubbles to the top of my consciousness like pure ecstasy. I begin to understand the weight of the gesture that is given from one sister in the photograph (in blue) to the other (in red). It is pure love, affection and consequently full of self-loathing, envy, jealousy, and resentment. The photograph no longer belongs to Alessandra Sanguinetti, nor to Guille and Belinda; but it that instant it is transported into the Other, the non-reality, into the stillness where it no longer exists, but represents an internal narrative. In this way I take from The Necklace, 1999 as much as it gives to me and I have come upon an entirely new image that I did not see when I first looked.