• “The operator is the Photographer. The spectator is ourselves.” Page 9, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
• “I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.” Page 20, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
• ‘The Photograph becomes “surprising” when we do not know what it has been taken.” Page 34, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
• “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”
Page 87, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
• “In the cinema, whose raw material is photographic, the image does not however, have this completeness.” Page 89, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
• “I then realized that there was a sort of link (or knot) between photography, madness and something whose name I did not know.” Page 116, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
• Esteban Pastorino Diaz, Shinjuku #1, 2005.* [Photo] Page 68, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Dawn Surf, Jellybowl Filmstrip 1 &2, Jennifer West, 2011.* [Photo] Page 76, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Adam Fuss, Untitled, 1999* [Photo] Page 88, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Sir John Everett Millais, Hearts Are Trumps, Emmanuelle Pardon, 1997.* [Photo] Page 90, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2005.* [Photo] Page 96, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• James Welling, Flower 014, 2006. * [Photo] Page 98, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Paul Graham, Man On Sidewalk, Los Angeles, 2000.* [Photo] Page 156, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Abbas Kiarostami, Untitled from the series “Rain”, 2005. [Photo] Page 166, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Ground #42, Uta Barth, 1994.* [Photo] Page 192, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Research Johannes Vermeer.* [Artist]
• Travelling Landscapes, Gábor Osz, 2002.* [Photo] Page 200, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a thing has happened.
The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.”
Page 4, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “It is mainly a social rise, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power.” Page 7, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.” Page 16, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in the public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.” Page 17, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• ‘The subject of Arbus’ photography is, to borrow the stately Hegelian label “the unhappy conscious”.’ Page 37, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• ‘” I’m very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known,” Arbus wrote. “They fascinate me when I’ve barely heard of them.”’ Page 45, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “For Arbus, the camera photographs the unknown.” Page 45, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but perceived by natural vision.” Page 55, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing.” Page 114, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted.” Page 114, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing of conscious intelligence, or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter.” Page 124, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “In this century, the older generation of photographers described photography as a heroic effort of attention, an aesthetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the world which required that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing.” Page 124, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• ‘According to Minor White, “the state of mind of the photographer while creating is a black… When looking for pictures… The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and feel it better.”’ Pp 124-125, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “Determined to prove that photographs could – and when they are good, always do – transcend literalness, many serious photographers have made of photography a noetic paradox.” Page 125, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world; and the two uses are complimentary.”
Page 181, Susan Sontag, On Photography.
• “The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.” Page 216, Jerry N. Uelsmann, On Photography.
• “Water or sunlight or fog would trigger personal memories – and so the work’s meanings were made in the merging of the forms he built and the associations viewers brought to them.” Page 19, Mark Godfrey, Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life.
• The Weather Project 2005 – Olafur Eliasson, Tate Modern, London * Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life. [Photo]
• Window Projection 1990 – Olafur Eliasson. * Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life. [Photo]
• Untitled 1993 – Olafur Eliasson. * Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life. [Photo]
• “Light has a surprisingly large number of effects that have nothing to do with our visual system.”
Page 43, Olafur Eliasson (Interview with Anna Wirz-Justice), Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life.
• “It even has existential dimension we are always a bit off, never quite synchronised.” Page 43, Anna Wirz-Justice to Olafur Eliasson.
• Rainbow veil and picture of rain – Olafur Eliasson. * Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life. [Photo]
• Anti-Numbness, Barry C. Smith. * [Read]
• Your Spiral View, 2002 – Olafur Eliasson. * Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life. [Photo]
Rachel Harrison – Untitled (Perth Amboy), 2001.
• “In Perth Amboy [39], American artist Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) observes a strange and obscure form of human gesture. The photographs show the window of a house in New Jersey, where it was claimed, there had been a visitation from the Virgin Mary on the windowpane. Guests to the house place their hands on either side of the window in an attempt to comprehend the phenomenon through the sensory experience of touch.” Pp. 45-46, Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
• “On one level, the repetition of people’s responses to the site makes Harrison’s Perth Amboy a sustained completion of human attitudes to the paranormal; on another; the repeated gesture remains visually unfathomable to us and we wonder what it means, mirroring the pilgrims’ desire for comprehension.” Page 46, Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
• “Roni Horn’s (b.1955) You Are The Weather [41] consists of sixty-one photographs of a young woman, taken over the course of several days. Her facial expression changes subtly but because of the repeated close framing of her face throughout the serious, when we compare the different images, the minute changes become magnified to a range of emotions.” Page 47, Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
• “The image is set at twilight, a time that signifies a turning point between the safety and normality of daytime and the covert, potentially threatening time of night.” Page 52, Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
• Jennifer Bolande – Globe, St Marks Place, NYC, 2001. * Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art. [Photo]
• “German artist Uta Barth’s (b. 1956) series Nowhere Near [29] pores down its subject matter to the spaces between things. Here she focuses on the view beyond whose blurred forms mark the boundary of what is outside the photographer’s visual range. Thus we are hypersensitive to what we edit out or do not look as, and so we do not define as a subject or
concept that can be seen. Barth’s photographs, when installed in galleries, resonate phenomenologically. The space between part of the interplay between space and subject, seeing and not seeing.”
Page 133, Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art
• “A signifier + signified = sign. The signifier is the material aspect of the sign: a picture, written word, or verbal sound (eg. – a – b – l – e ). The signified is the concept of the thing “in our head”, the psychological image of it.” Page 20, David Bate, Photography – The Key Concepts (Second Edition)
• “The realm of phrase-image, or what might be called the “paraxis imag” (of the side-byside image), is not new. The phrase-image constructs narrative threads of images (also sometimes with text) in a kind of community of thoughts. 19 These self-styled traces of existence as snapshot images organize a discourse on subjectivity. “Personal” photography” – that wears its fragmented montage of disconnected images as a feature of contemporary life, a personal identity in an image world.” Page 46, David Bate, Photography – The Key Concepts (Second Edition)
• The Decisive Moment. * [Read]
• “Looking and seeing are not the same thing. Looking is an act of vision, seeing is an act of perception and recognition. If we look at ourselves in the mirror, is this an act of looking or seeing, or when is it both?”
Page 81, David Bate, Photography – The Key Concepts (Second Edition)
• ‘The “scopic drive” is a wish that often manifests in the desire to see or be seen’ Page 228, David Bate, Photography – The Key Concepts (Second Edition)
• Ida Zander – YouTube: Negative Feedback. * [YouTube Channel + Videos]
• “These major and minor catastrophes I’m referring to aren’t mere learning experiences – after which wrongs are righted, instruments are recalibrated, courses are reset – but are themselves early brushes with success.”
Page 5, Erik Kessels, Failed It!
• This is a book about having the courage to fail spectacularly when the alternative is boring conformity and dull ideas. It’s about rejecting the safe and expected in favour of the excited and unknown.” Page 6, Erik Kessels, Failed It!
• “Whether planned or unplanned, mistakes force us to take a closer look. They catch our attention in a sea of bland excellence.” Page 35, Erik Kessels, Failed It!
• Heike Bollig, Book. University Workshop, Munich, 2004. [Read]
• “Sure, there are more bad pictures than good, but what we might see as photographic defeat – blurred focus, subjects cut off at the ankles and squinting into the sunlight, lamp posts growing out of heads – can in fact be a potent source of inspiration. There are the kind of things professionals toss into the trash and families send out as holiday cards.” Page 48, Erik Kessels, Failed It!
• Movements to look at: Abstraction, Dadaism; Grunge.
• “Scrutinizing your surroundings might not be an instinct, but it can become a skill.” Page 70, Erik Kessels, Failed It!
• André Thijssen – Tree and Building, Malaga, Spain, 2013. [Photo]
• André Thijssen – Mirror, Rosh Pim. Namibia, 2000. [Photo]
• “Imperfection is always closer to reality.”
Page 88, Erik Kessels, Failed It!
• Kurt Caviezel – Birds [Photo]
• Kurt Caviezel – Insects [Photo]
• Daniele Pario Perra – Low Cost Design, 2010 – 11 [Photo]
• Lucas Blalock – Rocking Chair, 2012 [Photo]
• “Thus Baudelaire is evoking the irrational, the spiritual and the imaginary as an antidote to the positivist interest in measurement and statistical accuracy, which, as we have noted, characterised much nineteenth century investigation.”
Page 13, Liz Wells, Photography – A Critical Introduction. • “Academic interrogation of photography employs a range of different types of understandings: scientific, social scientific and aesthetic.” “Historically, there has been a marked difference between scientific expectations of theory, and the role of theory within the humanities.” Page 29, Liz Wells, Photography – A Critical Introduction.
• “Photographs are the focus emotional engagement. In premising photographic effect on the visual and forensic alone, we limit our understanding of the modes
through which photograph have historical effect because photographs both focus and extend the verbal articulation of histories and the sound world they inhabit.” Edwards 2008:241. “Photographs, Orality and History”
• “Sontag’s discussion veers between the reasons for taking photographs and the uses to which they are put. It is marked by a sense of elusiveness of the photo-image itself. Page 33, Liz Wells, Photography – A Critical Introduction.
• “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world, we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.” The relationship between what we see and what we see and what we know is never settled.” Berger 1972a: 7, Ways of Seeing.
• “Though infested with many bewildering anomalies, photographs are considered our best arbiters between our visual perceptions our visual perceptions and the memory of them. It is not only the memory of them.” • It is not only their apparent ‘objectivity’ that grants photographs their high status in this regard, but on belief that in them, fugitive sensation has been laid to rest. The presence of photographs reveals how circumscribed we are in the throes of sensing. We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Page 35, Berger, Ways of Seeing. Kozloff, Page 101, Photography and Fascination, 1979.
• Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.” Page 35, Berger, Ways of Seeing. Kozloff, Page 101, Photography and Fascination, 1979.
• “For Sontag, the fact that a photograph exists testifies to the actuality of how something. Someone or somewhere once appeared. Page 34, Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• “Max Kozloff challenged Sontag’s conceptual model criticising her proposition that the photograph ‘traces’ reality, and arguing instead for a view of the photograph as ‘witness’ with the possibilities of misunderstanding, partial information or false testament that the term ‘witness’ may be taken to imply.” Kozloff, 1987: 237. Page 34, Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• “For Barthes, photography is never about the present, although the act of looking occurs in the present.” Page 37, Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• “Psychanalytic understandings of individual subjective responses offered new models of insight into human behaviour in ways which have been challenging academically (as well as offering therapeutic means of coming to terms with personal trauma)”. Regarding Freud 1880+ Page 3. Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror by Simon Watney* [Read] • ‘“The Shattered Mirror” refers to the rupturing of any notion of the photograph as a mirror or transparent recorder of reality.’ Page 40, Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• “Looking is not indifferent”
Freud Page 40, Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• Victor Burgin – Thinking Photography [Read]
• The Album of Sir Arnold Wilson (No. 7) 1990* [Photo]
• “Arguably, the gallery artwork not only offers visual pleasures but also operates to reassure a certain sense of intellectual and cultural elitism. Part of the pleasure of looking at pictures lies in discussing images and sharing responses.
Pp. 350-351, Berger, Ways of Seeing
• “It can also be a powerful instigator, in both obvious and subtle ways, for societal and personal change.” Page 15, Fred Ritchin, After Photography.
• “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between there are the doors of perception.” Aldous Huxley.
• “Photographers in their ambiguity can provoke, motivating the reader to interrogate their readings.” Page 97, Fred Ritchin, After Photography.
• “The photograph may create enough confusion and curiosity to stimulate the reader to solicit alternate voices, to peruse the accompanying text, or to click on the image and go to another screen.” Page 97, Fred Ritchin, After Photography.
• “Her work encapsulates a particular moment, when we are subconsciously ignorant of the fact we are looking.” Camilla Brown, Curator on Uta Barth. Page 193, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• ‘“I value confusion”, she says claiming that it “intensifies” he activity of looking.’ Page 192, Jackie Higgins on Uta Barth, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• “Standing behind the camera, looking through the viewfinder, closing the shutter is like momentarily leaving the world.” Nayoya Hatakeyama, Page 196, Jackie Higgins, Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus.
• Yoshinori Mizutani
• Rinko Kawauchi
Abigail Rumbellow - Critical Research Journal 