Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Any suggestion on resources, preferably scholarly, books or articles, that look at photography and memory? I've been through Roland Barthes Camera Lucida and Sontag's On Photography, they're kinda the foundation for what I'm working on but I need something that includes memory as a focus.

Try Jay Maisel's Light, Color and Gesture. I have only come across it from reading other photographers discuss and apply his ideas. You might find his thoughts on Color vs Shape and its implications to memory useful.


Randy

Why write a book when you can get people to pay $5000.00 a head for a workshop.

http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com ... jay+maisel I count 6.

How do you like them apples?

So sorry for not being clear, I was refering to the topic of Light, Gesture, Color

I have only come across this by reading Vincent Versace. John Paul Caponigro also has references to it. Atm, I'm still trying to wrap my head on Versace's concepts and it was a pain to acquire the book since it's out of print but what a joy to go through it.

Allow me:
Based on Josef Alber's premise that "shape is the enemy of color" meaning that if shape is in the presence of color, we tend to remember the shape not the color. The key is to make shape an ally (making it into color) that will make the viewer remember it.

The concept falls within composition and controlling the viewers eye
with color, light and gesture. The samples are printed on the book so I cannot present you with photos

No need to be sorry. No offense taken and non given.

Shuttereye

Perhaps you could kick off a new thread, Post your pictures of .......
Start with some preamble about what it is about and give us a couple of your own examples. I would be very interested.

Where does memory come in and what is it all about? I don't understand how memory is related to photography, except for remembering rules or muscle memory

This is already being done by a NY photo online forum. Based on book concepts and their take on it.

I can try, but it'll have to wait when I get back from my trip to muddy Moosonee. Probably waist high mud

[quote="Shuttereye
This is already being done by a NY photo online forum. Based on book concepts and their take on it.
[/quote]

Could you provide a link, tryed a quick google, but unsuccessfull

A photograph, in literary and cultural theory, is the capturing of a memory, an archival. If you're not familiar with Derrida, Barthes or Sontag, or art theory in general this stuff won't make much sense to you.

Thank you for the names Shuttereye, I'll see what I can dig up.

That's exactly why I asked, you seem well informed, maybe you could explain it a little

This gets complicated and very nebulous very fast, particular if you buy into liberal theory, think of the word 'theory' in this context as applied philosophy, yes, still messy, but for succinct description it may do. Memory as a field of theory is actually growing and soon I wouldn't be surprised to see it listed alongside Marxism, post-colonial. Certainly an important subset of psychological stuff, thanks Freud & Lacan. Memory is difficult because it reaches into almost every field and is the very core of our intelligence, without the ability to remember it information is useless. Think of the movie "Memento." Poor dude has no short term memory and thus has to externalize (write down - external memory is any form of information that is made permanent by making it physical in some fashion, digital counts) everything he needs to learn.

With photography how does this work? Well, we can start with the simple questions. Why does a photographer take a particular picture? What strikes them about a scene? What strikes the viewer as important? As photographers we try and make the subject of a photo explicit but we can never control the viewer's response. No matter how hard we try. This is where the theory of Barthes, a French philosopher/theorist, comes in, he, very much a non-photographer, claims there are two components to a photograph the "studium" and the "punctum." The studium is the general intent, yes authorial intent is very slippery, the content as framed by the photographer. "Punctum" is where it gets interesting with memory - it is the "trauma" of the photograph and/or the "unrepeatable," the phenomenological experience of the viewer. What will they remember in the photograph. Barthes I find hugely problematic because he gives very little credit to the photographer and separates the image from the photographer too much. He did the same thing with his highly influential essay The Death of the Author. Sontag, an American uhhh writer/theorist, takes into account the photographer in her work called On Photography, which I highly recommend to people who have an interest in pictures. She looks at a combination of why the photographer takes the pictures they do and tries to reconcile those photos against cultural ideals - why do certain pictures resonate within a culture?

With these things in mind we can start to look at some technicalities in photography, reality and memory. Remember photography was first hailed as the liberator of the realist painter, daguerreotypes captured the world as it really was, or did they? They were soft and not quite exact. Regardless there was for the first time a way of reliably archiving the world and boy did we start doing so. Especially when Edward Weston and Ansel Adams et al formed group f/64. We can easily infer what this tiny aperture means. Detail! The world as it is! They pushed for photos representing reality. Mostly created in darkrooms from memory. Depth of field and memory have an interesting relationship. What is lost in the bokeh? Is the whole story told? Our memory can have such a shallow depth of field that we only see things a certain way and the picture/memory, ahem, is not crystal clear. It's not hard to see the implications that our almost comparatively godlike post-processing abilities have now.

Photography has always had a sort of tenuous hold on its station as an art. Many of the froofroo(technical term there) claim it's not high art, most of us would call bullshit on that. It's not too hotly contested whether photography represents reality MORE than the other arts. It simply does. Although it is arguable that some authors can describe a scene better than some viewers can see one, I'm in that camp, that's mostly beside the point. This medium captures reality more accurately than any other bet yet we can alter it as much as we choose. The post-processing that goes on in Glamour photography is the perfect example. What happens to our ideas of beauty when they're so contrived and synthetic? Photography gave us the ability to see our history, what value does it have if we completely dick around with it? And of course from here is the liberal arguments of what is truth, what is reality and so on, somewhere in the middle of that is the area I am exploring. As far as I can tell there has no been much done in this field of memory and photography post digital watershed. Photography, with all the manipulation available, has become as nebulous as memory. Isn't the purpose of external memory to be as the early photographers hoped? Accurate representations of our world?

This is a very shallow gloss, and not one I reread so I may have mucked a couple things but generally this is the area of my research as an academic.

Sounds interesting, having been thrown into a little psychology in my university days, I understand most of the arguments. And yes, it is a very deep field if you want it to be. Thanks for sharing.

More about how the visual system of the brain works then on memory and photographs but you might find it a interesting if not useful read.

Vision And Art
The Biology of Seeing
By Margaret Livingstone

any book of very old photographs and an afternoon of reflection will get you farther than processed cheese, even top brand processed cheese. memory is a personal thing... sincerity and emotion, not technical vocabulary

btw, have you seen sontag's last?

of course, if you mean memory in the mechanistic, neuro-scientific sense, the above won't help you much. i would start (in fact, i did) with a basic undergrad textbook on biological psychology

ps. final essay time?

I covered some of the physiological concepts of memory with the paper I did in the Fall so I'd like to stay away from it a bit for this paper. Plus the prof is very into literary theory, it's what she wants to see.

I haven't seen much of Sontag's stuff, a handful of essays, but after reading On Photography I will make the effort to read more. She was obviously quite brilliant and had a style I rather like. Gravitating to fiction the way I do I'll probably try and track down In America which one the National Book Award. That committee and I usually agree on what makes a good book, unlike the damn Swedes! But that's another topic....yeah.

Indeed, final essay time. Three more weeks and I'll have my potato (Leo Bloom reference there... nevermind).

By "Sontag's last" I meant Regarding the Pain of Others. She's back on the subject revisiting (and revising) some of the earlier ideas. It's good.

Let me advocate "personal research" again (I'm not this prof, of course, but I am casting hateful glances here at the pile of essays awaiting their marks on my desk ). Pour yourself a glass of milk, sit back, cut off the noise, and slowly go over Frank's Paris, Vishniac's Vanished World, Cartier-Bresson's Europeans, Sander's Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts... Where are all these people now?

Then fast forward to Ben Sasso's blog, anything by Nachtwey, Salgado... Where will we be in a little while?

Your essay has been written already. You just have to blow off the dust.

Best of luck!

I do have the literary non-fiction option which is good. I have a photo album of my own from my film days. There was a gap of 7 years between my SLR and my DLSR where I did not shoot. I'm going to go over that as well. Thank you for the tips!