The French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote the essay “Death of the Author” in 1967 in which he proposed that the original intent of the author in his or her writings did not matter, and that the reader’s interpretation was the only thing that ever gave writing meaning. The implication is perspective changing. Although Barthes focused on literature, the underlying philosophy can be (and arguably has been) adapted to anything man made. Photography as an art form has not escaped this fate. The last decade has perhaps been the most cataclysmic in terms of changes in the medium. This is particularly noticeable in the consumerist hodgepodge that is the city. And although the proliferation of increasingly cheaper and more accessible cameras is nothing new (as evidenced as far back as the Kodak Brownie), I would argue that there has not been a point in history when photography has been more accessible, cheap and ubiquitous as it is today. It is so simple, so portable, and ultimately, now embedded in such a necessary device. Equipped with a camera phone, everybody is a photographer. The urban landscape has become flooded with amateur shutter-bugs who snap and click at every inclination simply because they can. This has created a common repeated criticism I have heard within photography circles: that technology, having become cheap and commonplace, has created art that is also cheap and commonplace. Browse almost any Twitter feed and you see an accompanying Instagram account flooded with pictures that seemingly lack rhyme, reason or any premeditation. The idea of ‘saying something’ has apparently become co-opted by the idea of ‘showing anything,’ as snapshots of things as arbitrary as a hamburger and fries are posted, but with a sepia filter to assume the look of something non-trivial and deep. As Barthes would argue however, who’s to say what has meaning and what doesn’t?
I love the city. Having lived in it all my life, in all its kinetic energy, to see that chaos captured perfectly still in a photograph is the oddest, most visually striking thing to me. I took the above photo downtown in some park, exact location forgotten and irrelevant. I wanted to capture a sense of that aforementioned frenetic “motion.” Passing a playground with children and parents and animals bustling about, it occurred to me that this little playground ecosystem was like a microcosm of the city energy that I wanted to capture. I set a relatively high shutter speed, threw a stick in the direction of some pigeons, waited for some motion, and clicked the shutter. I was quite pleased with the result and showed a few friends. Their interpretations of the shot surprised me to say the least. There were notions of nostalgia. There were interpretations involving the simplicity of childhood, and the loss of that serendipitous joy in the park. There was an interpretation that focused on the haphazard ordering of structures and subjects in the picture, claiming an endearing “symmetrical asymmetry” was present. Some loved the birds in mid motion, while some found the black-and-white in a scene that was typically portrayed very colourfully to be unsettling. Still, some found absolutely no meaning in the photograph at all. Having gotten the interpretations of close to twenty-some people, it occurred to me that similar themes kept reoccurring: that of nostalgia and simple joys of youth. These were things that resonated with people the most across the board and it is noteworthy that these elements were completely absent from my original intent. In that same token however, they’re also much more profound, and upon personal re-evaluation of the photograph, oddly, I found them to be much more fitting as well. What does this say about the actual proprietors of a photograph’s meaning?
The urban landscape is synonymous with multiple interpretations and dualities. The lights of a city street corner for example may represent warmth in an otherwise cold world, or indifferent man-made artificiality eclipsing the natural starry sky. The above photograph is of a dreary street corner on Toronto’s east end. It was taken on an evening testing out my newly handed-down flash-bulb and more specifically, it was the last photograph taken that night, when the battery of the bulb had already burnt out and all that was left to illuminate the otherwise all black canvas were the street lights. Truthfully it was an accident (though one I particularly like). Friends’ perceptions of the photograph range from it being the unfocused P.O.V. of a drunkard, to it raising a feeling of fear, unease, and/or nihilism. And once again, there were central themes throughout: coldness, isolation and loneliness. Like with the first picture, it is interesting that across many interpretations, several key feelings resonated even without the photographer’s cueing or hinting at them. It is as if my original intent (or admitted lack of it) could not stop the picture from becoming what it was ultimately meant to be. Perhaps there is something in the aesthetic formation of a good image that captures specific feelings that escape any presupposition and planning.
In the age of Instagram picture saturation, perhaps the photographer’s lack of purpose in taking a picture isn’t a problem. Perhaps the conclusive message of a photograph is something that can be completely detached from whatever the photographer’s intentions (or lack of intentions) happen to be. And as a habitat of mostly man-made structure in itself, the very city to me is Barthes’ idea actualized: edifices and objects that offer themselves to a multitude of perspectives and comprehensions. With every new picture I now take in it, I pause to consider whether I unknowingly pulled things unexpected from that floating ether of meaning, birthing the formation of ideas that I didn’t even know existed.
