Roland Barthes In The
Fashion System Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily
be translated into words. In this work he explained how in the fashion world
any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular
fashion says that a ‘blouse’ is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble,
this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual
sign could just as easily be interchangeable with ‘skirt’, ‘vest’ or any
number of combinations. In the end Barthes' Mythologies became absorbed into bourgeois
culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on a certain
cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership.
This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of
demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless
attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in
art. The loss of
his mother who had raised and cared for him was a terrible blow to Barthes.
He had often written works of theory on photography,
dating back as far as his individual works in Mythologies. His last great work was Camera Lucida. The text, which was a
meditation on an old picture of his mother, was half a theory of
communication through the photographic medium and half an act of grief to his
mother’s memory. The book investigates the effects of photography on the
spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object
photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum"). In a deeply
personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs,
Barthes considers photography as asymbolic,
irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much
as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium
and punctum: studium
denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a
photograph, punctum denoting the wounding,
personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the
object or person within it. The
photograph's reality, aside from all the messages it can be loaded with,
might constitute an avant-garde value; not a message as such, aimed at the
viewer/reader, but another kind of meaning, which arises almost accidentally,
yet without being simply 'the material' or 'the accidental;' this is the
eponymous third meaning. Roland
Barthes died less than three years after his mother. On 25 February 1980,
after leaving a lunch party held by François Mitterrand (who would be elected
president of France the next year), Barthes was
struck by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He
succumbed to his injuries a month later and died on 25 March.” What signs and symbols will you
use to construct meaning in your work? What juxtapositions of objects and
images and even text will help you communicate your message in your work? |