Connotation
-Hay bails -Field -Water on the lens -Road -Tire marks on the road. -Black and white image -Shadows in the distance (buildings? trees?) |
Denotation
-The photo is in the countryside -It is raining -The road has been used before -Could be taken on a walk -Probably taken in the daytime -Lack of people creates solitary feel to the image. |
Winter garden photographs Camera Lucida is about Barthes finding the perfect photo of his mother, and at the very end of the book he does, but he never includes the photo, making it a huge mystery in the history of photography, why he didn't include it, whether it was actually even real. Odette England created a book that includes photos from photographers who have created their own so called 'winter garden photographs. |
Odette England keeper of the hearth is a project based on Roland Barthes Camera Lucida in which he describes in detail his search for the perfect image of his late mother. At the end of the book he finds a picture of her when she was a child, standing with her brother at the end of a little wooden bridge inside a glassed-in conservatory. “There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.” He does not show the photo at the end of the book, only describes it. England's idea for the project was to find what have come to be called "winter garden photographs", which convey the same feeling that Barthes had when he saw that picture of his late mother, and expose the feeling of loss that every photograph has. |
The main thing I realized with film photography is that it forced me to think about the photo I was going to take and be introspective about why I was taking it. With digital photography I have a tendency to take a picture without thinking about it, or take 5 of the same photo to get it "perfect" but in this process I saw the positive side of that so called imperfection that people fear when it comes to photographs. I had to look at the photo so many times, as a negative, on a contact sheet, enlarged onto photopaper, and in that I was able to see the photos from a different perspective. It stands to reason in my opinion that this must be why film photography has survived the passing of time, because it makes us view images differently and perhaps less selfishly.
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Terrain Vague from Rosa Lubach-spall on Vimeo.