Editorial

On Reading and Interpretation

I admit to being naïve about art. My own profession deals with ideas too, but through a different kind of language, one that is always a signifier of a signifier and never a signified. I have long held that every language, including that of science, is metaphoric, and that truth is therefore invented rather than discovered. The language of painting is likewise a metaphor for its referents, yet a painter can invent without ever having seen the referent, and the same holds for the sculptor. Literature's referent, for the most part, is fictional and highly coded. In photography, however, despite its manipulations, there is a referent that existed at the moment of the photograph. Here reality and the past are superimposed, and the referent becomes the very essence, the noeme, of photography. Unlike the other artistic languages, photography, unless manipulated, invents nothing. It authenticates. The artifices it allows are not probative. What, then, does a photograph represent? That may be open to interpretation, but in photography the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.

My use of philosophy to illuminate literature has colored my understanding of photography. Returning to Barthes and Sontag has shown me that I cannot read a photograph the way I read a poem, because all it tells me is that something has been; and despite the codes in the image's studium, the photograph is without culture, objective and truthful. But it is a flat truth, two-dimensional and non-synchronic, and so not absolute. As Barthes proposes, in photography the presence of a thing, the noeme, is never metaphoric, and it is held in a single pose forever; the noeme is, in that sense, assumed dead, and immortalized as such.

When this dead noeme is animated into film, it deteriorates and is presented as alive forever, unless we are filming cadavers. Film invents a false sense of reality, and for that reason it is often granted a higher place than the photograph.

I am not suggesting that a photograph cannot be interpreted like other texts. The studium of the image may be deliberately coded, and the punctum may be what makes me react to the photograph and read it; but this punctum is also time, and the photograph becomes a pure representation of time rather than a form of intensity. The punctum may bring back memories and cultural references, yet once the memory returns it is no longer a memory. Linguistically, if I must place memory in a tense, I would call it the perfect; the photograph's tense is the aorist.

Photography, as an art, faces its own challenges. It is being commodified, reduced to the "Instagrammable". Its democratization has produced a world in which everyone is a photographer, and, as Barthes observed, we now consume images more than ideas or beliefs. The shift is liberating, but it carries the risk of diluting our authenticity.

I dedicate this issue of The Pasticheur to photography and poetry. It is an honor to showcase the work of Stefanie Schneider, Martin Stranka, Richard Brocken, John Free, Utz Rachowski, and Astrid Cabral.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor