Response to Thinking about Photography

Thinking about Photography

The article Thinking about Photography discusses many different ideas about photography and the impact of the medium since the nineteenth century. There are two main ideas that I would like to discuss that were debated in this article.
Photography has been debated about for years about whether this new technology would possibly be considered an art or not. Photography was regarded to be outside of the art world because of its accurateness and the composed recording process often appeared to displace the artist’s compositional creativity. Even though outside of the realm of art, I believe the medium should still be considered an art because of its great power that creates a different kind of art than painting or drawing can produce.
An important discussion in this article is Reading the image. It explains that semiotics and psychoanalysis have contributed to certain adjustments within the humanities. Both of these have been related to the creation of the meaning of photography. Roland Barthes is known for his semiological analysis contribution to visual culture. He thinks that it is reference rather than art, or communication, which is essential to photography. “In photography the referent uniquely sticks to the image.” The time-specific characteristic emerges from this into the photograph. The photograph deals with what was. It is believed that the photograph is always about looking and seeing which I presume to be true.