Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Richard clarified his view on photography and video. To mark the occasion I will post a quote by Roland Barthes from Rhetoric of the Image and pretend I have another 6 months to write a proper reply. Perhaps it's a red herring, a stalling technique. Hopefully it's food for thought.

[…] The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjuction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. […]

Yes, I had to look up stupefying. Next week: Why French authors prefer semi-colon over period and avoid commas altogether.