Photos as open texts
Umberto Eco talks about open texts, those that have many blank spots where reader interpretation can thrive. In the age of DSLRs and the photographic norms from Flickr where aestetics have become an unnatural obsession with 'sharpness' the technicalities of recording an image leaves little room for an open text (there are of course other way to make a photograph open). It is only when the equipment performs below par that we get an excercise in reader interpretation. Take for example the above photo that I got back from the photo lab yesterday. Somehow my shutter had become sticky after the first two exposures and now I'm left with 34 very open texts to interpret.
Tagged:
4 comments
Recent photos
About the blog
This is the personal website of Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen: commentary on media, communication, culture and technology. Read more»
Very interesting.
I smell a flickr group, a custom lens, a competition and a set of rules of submission for a new project... ;-)
That sounds like an awful lot of work at least for the digital heads out there. There's no custom lens needed for film. Simply buy an old camera with a leaf shutter, open the back and put some tape over half the frame before you load the film. The fun thing about my half-working camera is that the amount of black on the frame varies based on the chutter speed I chose (fast shutter = a lot of black, slow shutter means that it opened up to almost all the frame).
Projects are fun though as long as long as they don't start to suck up too much time (the lumiere project is great to maintain because it sucks up no time). stickyshutter.org is available I see....
Love this blog. Am bookmarking it!
There's an experiment i think you'd like--I own a few cameras, including a Holga--I love shooting 35mm film in my medium format holga..the results are amazing...the film is exposed even to the holes..i guess that's more room for interpretation.
And, no morten, photoshop wouldn't cut it easily on that one--since one never really knows how a holga exposes its film.
:)
Ben
I was thinking about Holgas the other day because I'd like to toy with medium format at some point. The exposed sprocket holes when running 135 through a Holga looks fun, but I then run into the problem that the film holder on my scanner would hide the sprocket holes since it uses them to snap the negative strip into place.
Can't win every time.
Add your comment