Semiotics	Discourse II	Visual Objects

Hubert Damisch provides greater insight into the role which the images taken by a camera can play in this process. He writes that "the full purview of a photographic document clearly involves a certain number of 'theses' which, though not of a transcendental order, appear nevertheless as the conditions for apprehending the photographic image" (Damisch, 87). That is, before we even take a look at an image, we already have formed preconceived notions about what we will see, regardless of what is actually pictured. For example, we may have certain ideas about photography which have been hardwired into us through art culture in particular which tell us what makes a photograph aesthetically pleasing in one way or another. But given Edensor's emphasis that the camera can capture a more totalizing sensory experience, there seems to be more to this. Damisch remarks that "[t]he photographic image [itself] does not belong to the natural world. It is a product of human labor, a cultural object whose being—in the phenomenological sense of the term—cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical meaning and from the necessarily durable project in which it originates" (Damisch, 88). Thus, I believe that by the very nature of the image, as a source of reproduction which feeds consuming culture, we are provided with a tool and unique point of entry from which to examine and, as Edensor suggests, critique that culture.     By harnessing the camera and consequently the photographic image to work against consuming culture rather than with it, we can more fully grasp what that culture is and how it affects us. As Damisch puts it, "[h]istory determined [sic] that this [photographic] act would find its goal in reproduction," but who's to say that reproduction can't be related to reconstructing the kind of experience of the unexpected which Edensor talks about (Damisch, 89)? Thus, in taking the camera as my tool for digging through ruins of bygone days, I hope to reveal that it can produce much more than a visual replica; I hope to not just reproduce, but produce a new experience. According to Damisch, "[p]hotography aspires to art each time, in practice, it calls into question its essence…soliciting in us the producer rather than the consumer of images" (Damisch, 89). Whether or not photography can, in fact, play this dual role is another matter worth exploring.

Roland Barthes investigates this medium that photography itself seems to work in as an extension of our experience: "According to an ancient etymology, the word image should be linked to the root imitari," and Barthes asks the question, "can analogical representation ('the copy') produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols?" (Barthes, 114). Essentially, are photographs more than the sum of their parts, that is, more than the semiotics which can be ascribed to particular objects? Barthes proposes that the solution lies in how the image 'speaks' to us when we interpret it. He notes two main types of messages that an image conveys, one "whose substance is linguistic" and the other which he calls "the pure image…[which] provides a series of discontinuous signs" (Barthes, 115).     Semiologically, these interpretations can be broken down further into denotative and connotative meanings of objects, and how these influence what we 'read' in a photograph. That is, the kinds of value which we ascribe to objects that Edensor mentions come from our decoding of these various meanings which, of course, are culturally imbedded. They explain why, when we see an image, we think a certain way. Barthes writes, however, that "the relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not one of 'transformation' but of 'recording,' and the absence of a code clearly reinforces the myth of photographic 'naturalness': the scene is there, captured mechanically, not humanly" (Barthes, 120). This grounds us in the notion that photography is, at least initially, an agent of consumer culture which works to keep up the kind of seamless façade mentioned earlier. But to encourage the technique Edensor seems to suggest, just because certain semiotic systems are associated with objects doesn't inherently indicate that those are the only meanings that can be associated with an object. Barthes points out that "each sign corresponds to a body of 'attitudes'" perpetuated by society (Barthes, 121). But the camera and its associated systems of meaning can be appropriated to introduce new meanings as well. At any rate, that is exactly what the camera did at its inception; it gave people new ways of seeing.

Ulrich Keller drives this point about photography home. With the introduction of the camera came a "new awareness of people, places, and things," an awareness that, while it came to be structured by the cultural semiotics of society, also brought its own sense of meaning into the fold (Keller, 158). This is the unique sensibility that I think Edensor is trying to capture through photography, the ability of a visual medium to produce an encompassing sensory experience.     Of course, photography did its part to aid in the evolution of mass culture when it moved beyond being the hobby of a few eccentrics into the hands of the general population. It is this "wide circulation [of photography] as a mass medium" which undoubtedly propelled it into the position of power in consuming culture that it holds today (Keller, ibid). Put simply, that power is the ability to show 'what is.' In addition, however, photography opened up the realm of the possible, leaving constraints of mobility as their own sort of ruin in the past. Keller notes that in "opening up the realm of movement and action," photography pushed new boundaries for how we could see the world (Keller, 164). However, with this seeming extension of our experience also came the more confining aspect that in seeing more of the world, we are ourselves further revealed to that world.