On Learning and the Image

My recent photo exhibit made me think about and revisit some ideas that I have about images and text. Roland Barthes had much to say about text and image. I have been thinking about text as technology and photograph as a medium, alchemical almost, for imagination. The photograph, or the image, presents itself non-linearly unlike the text, which is sequential and cumulative. While both these mediums differ, sometimes they are used together. In that case, the structure of the photograph does not remain an isolated structure; it communicates with text. In school and education, text takes precedence over everything else. It blots out all other modes of reception and processing. Another question that arises concerns about the primacy of substantiation. Does the text substantiate the photo, or is it the other way around? In our learning materials, the photo is always a second class citizen that needs substantiation by text. In many cases that is warranted. But we must be open to image centred exploration as well, where text adds context to the image.

Barthes says, "these two structures are co-operative but, since their units are heterogeneous, necessarily remain separate from one another." Text is made of smaller units such as paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters. The corresponding elements in an image would be lines, surfaces, colours, textures, and shades. In some instance, such as the Rebus format, words and images are awkwardly fused in to a single line of reading.

There is a reduction in fidelity from the object to its image representation, such as in proportion, perspective, colour, etc. But this reduction is never a transformation in symbolic form, such as it is for textual representation. A text is a code-symbol system of representation, while an image is a high fidelity analogue (even if there is an artistic flourish of post-processing) of the reality.

Barthes further says, "All 'imitative' arts - drawings, paintings, cinema, theatre - comprise two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it."

Some photographs (even styles or genres of photography) are mechanical analogues of reality. The first order message, a near perfect representation of reality, dominates a viewer's perception, such as press photographs. Whereas some images leave room for, or even encourage, second-order message. This involves active participation of the viewer to draw out a personal and shared meaning from the image.

Marshall McLuhan once said that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of print is writing, which is another medium itself. The content of writing is speech, which is yet another medium. All mediums exercise an epistemic framework on the 'reader'. We must be aware of the medium and what it does to our understanding of the phenomenon or concept it tries to present to us. The content of the photograph is the act of seeing, which is the most fundamental act we perform for engaging with the world.
As a photographer, my intent is to move toward images that make it possible for the new meanings and interpretations to emerge.

Consider these:

Here are some images from the exhibit.