A little on photography

I guess I am one that is forever behind in techno stuff about disguising. (Hey the only thing I am aware of is what is memory.) Hmm, I dunno but most guys seem to have a knick for these gadgetry and technical aspects, can imagine like its cameras now and who knows, cars in a few years time.

But it is interesting to consider what Roland Barthes noticed, " what the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photogrpah mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existenially ". Truly, the photograph is a sort of testimony to what has been and a essentially personal connection as well.

Barthes points to a certain punctum( the prick, sting or sudden wound that makes a particular photograph epiphanic to a particular viewer) which is so powerful and overwhelming that the snap shot has achieved for him "utopically, the impossible science of unique being'

But the photographic referant is not only the real thing placed before the lens but an object meshed in cultural coding as well. A photograph can be hold different interpretations for different people and draw together all sorts of metonymic linkages.

Quite contrary to Barthes' very private perception of photography, Boltanski produced inventions of 'fake' photographs which plays upon the conventional cliches that people have unconsciously absorbed. In Les Suisses morts (the dead swiss) the subject is the photographs of some 3000 dead Swiss citizens as depicted in the obituary announcements published in the Swiss regional newspaper. The photos are out of focus and no longer resembling the people they portray. The installation focuses an the observer's memories and through the element of melancholy, evokes the memory of that moment in time frozen in the photo. We have all experienced this in one way or another when studying photographs of relatives who we do not otherwise know. The nameless portraits unconsciously set emotions free even though each of these photographs conceals the fate of an individual.

Noting that, Boltanski questions the existence of identity. " We are all so complicated and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly we become nothing but an object, an absolutely digesting pile of shit", but "what is always fascinating is that every being is interchangeable, and at the same time each one has had a very different life with different desires"

Do photographs replace memory then? Do we only remember people through their pictures?