The still image - Camera Lucida and the Spotless Mirror: towards a heuristic analysis of the image as a cult object.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
W H Auden

This case study considers the extent to which ideas proposed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography  may be applicable generally to other types  of images, particularly paintings.  It should be acknowledged that this is not a line of enquiry that Barthes himself would have countenanced.  He asserts at the outset a desire ‘to learn at all costs what Photography was in itself, by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images’.[1] 

My particular understanding and knowledge of ‘the community of images’ acts as a barrier to fully engaging with Barthes’s method; he asserted, ‘I want to be a primitive, without culture.’[2]  My experience is grounded on the opposite premise, that images can only be understood within culture through objective analysis. My approach  to Art History remains broadly in line with the methodology set out in Panofsky’s essay History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline in which he proposed  placing art objects within a ‘cosmos of culture’.[3]  Wood characterised this approach:  ‘The strategy was to isolate the work temporarily in order to grasp more clearly its deep structural principles, and then ultimately to reinsert the work into its primordial environment on more legitimate grounds. ‘[4]  Some critics adopted a more scientific approach. For example, Gombrich’s  Art and Illusion, employed discoveries relating to visual perception  to explore  ‘illusionism’ in Western Art. [5] Where more recent developments were embraced – relating to semiotics for example – Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing sought to place discussion of the image firmly within the context of material culture.[6] Given this broadly ‘cultural turn’ then Barthes’s more provocative assertions such as  ‘a photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see’ seem at times counter-intuitive and sometimes deliberately mystifying, and any attempt to place Camera Lucida within  ‘the community of images’ fated towards an inevitable impasse.[7]

1.  An Encounter with Barthes in Bruges

Coincidence came to the rescue.  During a visit to Bruges I happened to read an excerpt from Camera Lucida just before visiting the Groeninge Museum. A subsequent ‘encounter’ with two works in the museum helped me to place Barthes’s ‘mathesis singularis’ within a broader art historical context. It demanded that I reflect on my personal responses to the pictures.  Although this risked blurring the boundary between critical analysis and anecdotal reflection, in order to understand Barthes’s heuristic approach it seems necessary to engage in it.  First I need to recount a minor incident which occurred next to Van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon Van der Paele (Appendix 1, Fig 1):

In the first room hang two Van Eyck’s (…) I was lagging behind a bit when Gill called me over, "I've just seen something amazing" she said, and drew my attention to the jewel-like brilliance of the rug upon which the Virgin is enthroned, the details were so carefully rendered you could almost see the fabric strands of the carpet. "How did he do it" she enthused, "imagine how tiny the brush must have been to paint like that," her forefinger hovering two or three inches away from the heavy glass screen that protected the picture. At this juncture a nearby attendant intervened, and rather than supply us with a nugget or two of information concerning mid-fifteenth century oil painting techniques, admonished us as if we were naughty children, "Don't point Miss with your finger so close at the picture".[8]

In order to turn ‘singularity into a virtue’ and enable his heuristic pursuit of the ‘genius’ of Photography, Barthes performed a simple rhetorical trick.[9] He corralled ‘average’ images and the culture in which they were situated into an invented category termed ‘the studium’.[10] This move cleared the way for Barthes to ‘make himself the sole ‘mediator for all Photography by concentrating on those images which ‘existed’ only for him, and from that ‘formulate the fundamental […] universal features’ of Photography.[11]  The incident in the museum reveals that Barthes’s – admittedly egotistical – approach is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Art galleries can be regarded as ‘the studium’ institutionalised. An image hung in a gallery is elevated and made ‘average’ simultaneously: elevated into a cultural icon, but equal among many.

The attendant’s intervention indicates that galleries operate not as cultural store-houses but as shrines. Berger expresses this as a process of ‘mystification’ where the works of art are ‘enveloped in an atmosphere of bogus religiosity’.[12]  He acknowledges his debt to Walter Benjamin’s work which developed the notion of works of art being accorded an ‘aura’; Benjamin usefully differentiates between the original ‘cult value’ of the image – often derived from its religious function – and a latter-day ‘exhibition value’, based upon pricelessness, hence Berger’s assertion that the ‘aura’ is ‘bogus’. [13]  The attendant intervened, not because there was any physical risk to the painting protected by a thick glass screen, but because the spectator’s enthusiastic gesture offended some unspoken decorum accorded to the image, not because of its ritual value but from its material, exhibition value.

The on-looker’s animated, visceral response before Van Eyck’s iridescent altarpiece (Appendix 1 fig. 1) resembles Barthes ‘affective intentionality’ towards those photographs which ‘pricked’ him and stood out from the mass of images he deemed as ‘unary’. He termed these ‘poignant’ images ‘the punctum’, ascribing a variety of epithets to the phenomena: wounds, specks, stings, little holes (p26), also, adventure (p19) a turn (as in milk) (p6).[14] In most cases, for Barthes, it is an apparently insignificant detail within the image which provokes the visceral reaction. By comparing the experience of visitor to the Bruges museum with descriptions of Barthes’s response to photographs it is possible to speculate if the two reactions are related and so draw some conclusions regarding the extent to which assertions about the nature of photography can be applied more broadly to some types of painting.

It unsurprising that a spectator standing in front of the Van Eyck is struck by the detail of the carpet, for it spills, like a garish cascade down the dais’ steps towards them. Van Eyck’s mastery of linear perspective enables the Virgin and Child, Canon Van der Paele, his patron saints and the onlooker to share the same space. The painting is an early Flemish example of a type of devotional painting which had recently emerged in Italy known as a Sacra Converzione. The painting represents a revolution in terms of theology, composition and technique. Comparison with The Wilton Diptych (Appendix 1, fig 2) produced thirty years previously reveal these innovations; in The Wilton Diptych the realms of the divine and secular are physically separated on opposing panels, whereas, Van Eyck includes mortal and divine participants within an integrated space. Moreover, the beholder of the Van Eyck is summoned through the perspectival device of a single vanishing point to share the pictorial space, whereas the Wilton Diptych’s profile portrait of Richard II emphasises the pre-eminence of the picture plane. Barthes, one suspects, would have dismissed such an overt, illusionistic ploy as an instance of a unary image where ’”unity” of composition (is) the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric.’[15] However, it is not the absorbing illusionism - the arrangement - which ‘pricks’ the onlooker, but the peculiar physicality of the painting, and it is here where the relationship with Barthes’s ‘punctum’ resides.

Erwin Panofsky writes of the Van Eyck painting in the following terms:

From the sheer sensuous beauty of a genuine Jan Van Eyck there emanates a strange fascination not unlike that which we experience when […] hypnotised by precious stones or when looking into very deep water.[16]  

Van Eyck’s technique is to apply a uniform intensity across the whole picture, thus the tufts on the carpet are afforded the same miniaturist attention as The Virgin Mary’s facial features. Whereas the earlier Wilton Diptych had asserted the cult value of the artefact through the use of extensive use gold leaf and expensive lapis lazuli pigment, it is Van Eyck’s virtuoso skill that imparts the devotional function; that this was well understood at the time is shown by the Latin inscription on the frame which refers to a ‘spotless mirror’ clearly connecting the painter’s technique with a metaphor used in contemporary theological writing in relation to The Virgin Mary’s purity.[17]

Early in the twentieth century the pioneering Art Historian, Bernard Berenson, sought to account for the material impact of such paintings by putting forward a theory linking retinal impressions to ‘tactile values’; that a painting’s texture stimulated a ‘tactile imagination’ through a process akin to synaesthesia.[18] Texture’s appeal to ‘tactile values’ are also central to certain of Barthes’s reflections concerning the ‘punctum’. His description of the dirt road which forms the background to - A Kertesz: The Violinist’s Tune, Abony, Hungary, 1921  (Appendix 1 fig 3) - is typical.[19] He writes, ‘…the dirt road; its texture gives me certainty of being in in Central Europe; […] (here the photograph really transcends itself…to annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?).’ Compare Panofsky’s concluding thoughts regarding the Jan Van Eyck altarpiece: ‘it claims to be both a real object […] and a reconstruction rather than a mere representation of the visible world.’ The correlation is apparent, both images, though the intensity of their ‘tactile value’ transcend the representational medium to reconstruct experience rather than represent it.

Other images in Camera Lucida display similar textural presence, for example Charles Clifford’s Alhambra (p 39). However, it would be wrong to assert that the majority of the images that ‘pricked’ the author were of this ilk. Rather the point here is that there are closer connections between established art theory and Barthes’s observations than his avowed heuristic method might lead us to believe. For example, the analysis of gesture in Mapplethorpe’s Young Man with Hand Extended (p58)  and the commentary on the image of two nuns in Koen Wessings’s Nicaragua (p22) could easily fall within established iconographical discourse concerning ‘expressional meaning’.[20]  Moreover, discussion of ‘Lewis H. Hine: Idiot Children in an Institution, New Jersey 1924’ explores detail - ‘the boy’s huge Danton collar, the girl’s finger bandage.’ [21]The ‘wounding’ effect of this image could just as easily accounted for from a classical semiotic standpoint which considers the connotations of each detail as Barthes insistent refusal to ‘inherit anything from another eye than my own’.

Perhaps the aspect of Camera Lucida which is most interesting and distinct from previous theory concerns the discussion of photographs in relation to ‘punctum as time’ rather than ‘form’ – the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (that-has-been”).[22]  It is this ‘catastrophic’ aspect of Camera Lucida which will now be considered.

2. The Invisible Picture – A Barthesian Murder Mystery.

First, however we must briefly re-visit the Groeningse Museum and the notion that galleries are the ‘studium institutionalised’. The museum’s chronological arrangement of artefacts charts the slow decline of Bruges as a mercantile power.  The great works of the Flemish Primitives are displayed in the first room;  when you approach the exit the paintings become more provincial, less ‘important’. I noted as I left, a Magritte (minor work!), and a late nineteenth century realist family portrait which I glanced at cursorily.  Over the next few days something unexpected occurred; it was not the Flemish masterpieces that I recalled, but the disregarded family portrait. Furthermore, the face of the youth on the left of the picture haunted me; when I thought of it I was struck by a pervasive sadness. An annoyingly irrational response; nonetheless I felt compelled to track the painting down. This proved more difficult than envisaged; no amount of searching – Boolean or otherwise – could unearth the image. Ignoring an anxiety that I may have dreamed the picture, I gave up on Google and emailed the museum (Appendix 1 fig 4).

This situation illustrates two key ideas in Camera Lucida. Firstly, the picture had become invisible; recovering it required me to articulate a lost painting. It felt like some kind of whodunit where the image had replaced the ubiquitous body in the library. Secondly, the way I had been moved by a detail – the youth’s facial expression – resembled the effect on Barthes of particular photographs ‘punctuated with […] sensitive points.[23]  A forthcoming seminar presentation required me to find a still image as the basis for discussion. When the curator responded to my email identifying the ‘lost painting’ as a work by   Edmond von Hove - Triptych, with portraits of the artist and his family;  I decided to comparison of the painting with ideas taken from Camera Lucida.

Rather than reiterating the presentation’s content I prefer to critically re-evaluate it, as I became dissatisfied with its conclusions almost immediately.  Comparing the description of the painting in the email (Appendix 1, fig 4) with the work itself (Appendix 1, fig 3) reveals key differences between the actual image and the way  I recalled it: the memorized picture was a unified scene, not a triptych, moreover, the figure of the artist’s wife had been sidelined.[24]  Barthes’s apparently counter-intuitive assertion that the picture is ‘not what we see’ was shown to be perceptive; it is what we remember and know which re-constitutes the image in our mind’s eye. The various ‘readings’ of the painting (the studium) put forward in the presentation are relevant here only to the extent they failed entirely to account for its punctum – the young man’s face.[25] The presentation concluded that the visceral response was sparked by ‘latent recognition’; that the onlooker recognized his own face as a child in that of the young man in the painting, and recalled a particular family photograph which provoked a strong emotional response (Appendix 1, Fig. 6.)[26]

This conclusion was troublesome on two counts: Firstly the extent to which it rested on subjective, personal anecdote felt at odds with accepted academic standards related to objectivity and personal bias; secondly, the conclusion appeared to contradict Barthes in one important respect - his insistence that the punctum cannot be explained. He likens it to a haiku which is ‘undevelopable: […] neither the Haiku or the Photograph can make us “dream”’.[27] What then of my conclusion? Was it merely a rationalisation after the fact, an outbreak of sentimentality? 

3. The Remembrance of the Dead

As I prepared the presentation it became clear that my understanding of Camera Lucida was hampered from having read only substantial extracts, all taken from part one. After I found a complete copy it soon became clear that part two of the work is fundamentally different and develops ideas found in earlier chapters to the point of contradicting them. Far from asserting that the punctum cannot be explained, Barthes, grieving at the recent death of his mother, expands his ideas around this ‘subtle beyond’ into a profound contemplation of the relationship between the ‘noeme’ of photography (that-has been) with memory, lineage and mortality. Indeed, his discussion in chapter 40 of ancestral resemblance comes uncannily close to my own speculation regarding the young man in the Van Hove painting. How could this be?  Setting aside intuition, a shared source had to be the only explanation.

Section VI of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction states:

In photography, exhibition value begins to replace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. […] The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers the last refuge of the cult value of the picture.[28]

Part 2 of Camera Lucida can be interpreted as an extended and profound re-evaluation of the ‘cult value of the picture’. Some of the earliest representations of recognisable individuals lie in the funerary monuments of ancient Athens. The deceased are shown seated, bidding farewell to their loved ones. These modest sculptures share with Barthes’s photographs, a punctum - the noeme (that has been).  Barthes is correct to recognise the unique evidential power of the photograph which unlike previous types of representation can never ‘feign reality without having seen it’.[29] Nevertheless, in the area of portraiture at least, as Benjamin states, there is continuous, long standing pictorial tradition linked to the ‘the cult of remembrance’. Gombrich suggests a physiological basis to this: ‘the recognition of the human face […] is based on some kind of inborn disposition of biological significance to our survival’.[30]

Camera Lucida is more closely connected with the theory and history of Western Art than Barthes would have us believe. His singular approach, segregating particular photographs to analyse them heuristically, resembles Panofsky’s method of isolating works from culture in order to reinstate them more legitimately. After a century where the thrust of History of Art seemed largely a quest for objectivity, Barthes reinstated the subjective, treating photographs as having cult value – devotional objects. However, whereas the cult value of religious art depended upon adherence to received doctrine as the onlooker contemplated immutable truth, Barthes substitutes religious meditation with what might be termed humane pensiveness and proposes a ‘new science for each object’, a secular methodology to engage with the latent power of the image within a unary culture that rejoices via Snapchat.

[1] Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (London: Vintage, 1980, trans 1993) p 3

[2] Ibid. p.7

[3] Panofsky, Erwin, ‘History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) , pp 23-81.

[4] Wood, Christopher S, ‘Introduction’, in Perspective as Symbolic Form, Erwin Panofsky, trans, by Christopher S Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991) pp. 7-24.

[5] Gombrich, E, H, Art and Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation, 5^th edn, (Oxford, Phaidon, 1977)

[6] Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972)

[7] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.6.

[8] Heels For Dust. (2013) Windmills in the Mist. [On-line] 1.11.2013. Available from -  http://gillandpete.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/windmills-in-mist.html   [Accessed: 14.12.2013].

[9] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.8

[10] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.26

[11] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.9

[12] Berger,  John. op. cit,. p21

[13] Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936 ). [On-line] Available from - http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm  [Accessed  13.12.12]

[14] ‘Barthes. Roland, op.cit.

[15] ‘Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.41.

[16] Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting, (London: Oxford University Press, 1954) vol. 1, p. 180.

[17] Kilbourn, Russel, J. A., Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, (Oxford: Routledge, 2013) p. 151

[18] The Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner, (London: Grove Dictionaries, Macmillan, 1996) pp. 764-765

.[19] Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting, op. cit., p180.

[20] Panofsky, Erwin, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of The Renaissance, (Oxford: OUP, 1939) p3. Ebook, Perseus On Demand: http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Panofsky_iconology2.pdf  [Accessed 17.12.2013]

[21] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.50.

[22] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.96.

[23] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.27.

[24] Turpie, Peter, The invisible picture: encountering Barthes in Bruges . Microsoft Powerpoint, 13 /11/2013 , slide 7. Available from - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1F5OCp74F-tIMd2Uc6lbSQ4ycXQUQkqF37uybepFXoQs/edit?usp=sharing

[25] Ibid, slides 8 – 11.

[26] Ibid, slides 13 & 14.

[27] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.49

[28] Benjamin, Walter, op. cit.

[29] Barthes. Roland, op.cit., p.76

[30] Gombrich, E, H, op. cit., p. 87

Appendix 1

Figure 1,  Jan Van Eyck, Virgin and Child with Canon Van der Paele; Bruges, Groeninge Museum. 1436

Figure 2, Unknown, the Wilton Diptych, London: National Gallery, around 1395 – 1399.

Figure 3, A. Kertesz: The Violinist's Tune,  Hungary, 1921.

Figure 4. Email to Groeninge Museum, 31.10.2013

Figure 5, Edmond von Hove, around 1890, Bruges, Groeninge Museum

Figure 6, Unknown, The Turpie Family, 1966.

Figure 7, Athenian Grave Stele, Fifth Century B.C., Athens: Archaeological  Museum.

Perspective as Symbolic Form

Panofsky, Erwin, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans Christopher S Wood ( New York: Zone Books, 1994, originally published as 'Die Perspektive als symbolisch Form,'  in the Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg 1924 - 1927 (Leipzig & Berlin: 1927).

For a book to be both influential and obscure would appear on the face of it to be a contradiction in terms. However, Panofsky's early writings on the problem of perspective achieve this. It is influential in-so-far as it formulated a innovative approach towards analysing 'artistic products' - which Panofsky asserted in 1920 were 'not statements by subjects, but formulations of material, not events, but results. Wood, in his densely argued introduction makes the point that the strategy of of 'isolating the work temporarily in order to grasp more clearly its deep cultural principles' can be regarded in terms of Art History as a parallel to New Criticism's approach to literary criticism. This approach sharpens 'our sensitivity to the social character of the linguistic sign', thus enabling the work to be reinsert(ed) into its primordial environment on more legitimate grounds'. Panofsky sought, by attempting to reconcile 'materialist' and 'idealist' approaches to art history to develop a new 'serious Kunstphilosophie'. This method, first utilised in Perspective as Symboic Form and later more fully realised in canonical texts such as Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) and Renascences and Renaissances in Western Art (1960) contributed significantly to the development of History of Art and were highly influential during the rise of the subject as a separate discipline in British and American Universities during 1960's.

Panofsky's  Perspective as Symboic Form was first translated into English sixty five years after its original publication; this partly accounts fot its apparent obscurity as a text within undergraduate study. However it did influence the better kown work by  E. H. Gomebrich who cites it as a key source for chaper VIII of  Art and Illusion - The Ambiguities  of the Third Dimension (1960). However, the latter text does not quite capture the ingenuity of Panofsky's original argument. Based on a series of lectures, Perspective as Symboic Form is divided into five sections. It opens with a consideration of the differences between the kind of perspective found in Greek and Roman art which adheres to the 'retinal' curvature of Euclidean mathematics, compared with linear perspective, developed during the early Renaissance by Durer and Alberti.. The following sections amplify this idea and set our in detail the philosophical and scientific assumptions behind Byzantine and Medieval art's treatment of space and compare these to early modern notions regarding the perspectiival view as a 'window' which assumes a single observer and vanishing point.

The imaginative leap that Panofsky makes is to redefine the relationship between Euclidean curved perspectiive, the Romansque assertion of surface pattern and Renaissance linear perspective. The conventional view asserts that the return to a representational art in the Renaissance was largely a rebirth of classical principles. Panofsky not only sets out the key differences between classical art's conception of space and that of the Renaissance but makes a case for regarding medieval art's interest in surface pattern as an important influence on  renaissance painting's conception of space. He maintains that the single vanishing point of linear perspective contains within it, elements of medieval concerns with surface through its picture plane, albeit rendered invisible as the a 'glass wall' of  a fifteenth century master's 'window' on the world.

The final section broadens the discussion to consider the impact of linear perspective more broadly within the emergence of a new world view during the early modern period. Panofsky argues that Plato's objection to classical perspective - that it replaced the richness of reality with arbitrary subjective appearance, and the apparently contrary objection of twentieth century thinkers - that it was the tool of a limited and limiting rationalism, are in fact 'the double face of one and the same issue'. Underlying both these concerns is the issue that 'perspective mathematizes visual space [...] it is an ordering of  visual phenomena', and as uch tends to emphasise visual experience and knowledge over other sensations and experiences. Some of the broader cultural effects of this are then explored. Perspective 'seals off'' religious art from the symbolic and magical and instead opens up the representation of the 'visionary' where supernatural events 'erupt' into the beholder's apparently natural visual space and so 'permit him to imternalise their supernatualness'. This latter phenomena, Panofsky argues, opens up visual art to the psychological, paving the way not only for  Baroque visionary exuberance but also the insight and profundity foundin late Rembrandt. He concludes:

'Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human conciousness; but for that very reason, conversly, it expands human conciousness into a vessel for the divine'.

I came to Panofsky's work on perspective while researching Roland Barthes' book on photography Camera Lucida. In many ways their conclusions and arguments are diametrically opposed. Panofsky talks of perspective as a device which enables the 'objectivisation of the subjective'. Barthes' conclusions regarding photography infers the opposite, that as a medium it subjectivises the objective. In one crucial respect, however, the books are similar; both 'overspill' the limits of a discipline and draw conclusions of broader cultural significance from a  focussed starting point. Barthes sets out to reflect on photography, however Camera Lucida strays into a broader contemplation into the nature of memory, ancestral remembrance, and death. Panofsky too uses the narrow starting point of the nature of perspective to speculate on how this mathematical 'trick' underlies many aspects of the Western world view. Given that in the ninety years since its first publication we have swapped the picture plane for the screen as our primary method of representation and human communication, then if anything issues relating to a world represented through the limitations of Albertian perspective becomes more pressing than ever. It is little surprise, therefore, that this early work by Erwin Panofsky, which remained somewhat overlooked for many years, has recently been re-evaluated. The statement on the book's jacket  hailing  Perspective as Symbolic Form as 'one of the great works of modern intellectual history' no longert appears to be entirely hyperbolic.

Three Short Stories.

It's a coincidence really that I have ended up reading in the past couple of weeks three 'fin de siecle' short stories on the theme of marriage.

Is 'The Yellow Wallpaper' a short story or a novella?  Do I know the difference anyway?  Probably not. It's not surprising that it has become canonical as a feminist text. Apart from the fact that Charlotte Perkins Gilman became an important campaigner for women's right in the USA, so this example of her early writing - published in 1892 - would have interested people researching the development of feminism in America irrespective of its literary qualities.

The front cover of Virago edition that I purloined from my daughter sub-titles the work with the phrase 'A Literary Masterpeice'. It's difficult to disagree with that. The portrayal of the protagonists inner state is vivid, claustrophobic and disturbing. The prose is spare and direct, sentences often short and pithy;  or if longer, made up, almost list-like, of short simple clauses which pile up. The effective is obsessive. Most powerful of all, the use of the central image of the yellow wallpaper whose strange 'shape-shifting' patterns obsess the main character and chart her slow, inexorable derangement.

The main character is imprisoned, both psychologically and to a large extent physically by her position as wife to a respectable doctor who espouses a purely scientific and materialistic view of the world. His reaction to his wife's misery and need to write is to view both as something 'not to dwell upon' and increasingly the main character is forced into a subservient position, unable to take the simplest decision without recourse to her husband or his sister. We never get to find out the main character's name; her husband simply refers to her as 'my little girl'.

Perkins Gilman positions the protagonist in an interesting way between the reader and the other characters in the story, it is told exclusively through her eyes. What she tries to keep hidden from them - the extent of her misery, her increasingly insane feelings about the wallpaper - she confides in the reader. We share her secrets, but only sometimes, she does not fully trust us. Her feelings towards the other members of the household, particularly her husband, are conflicted and inconsistent and by turns, deceitful, spiteful, simperingly compliant or wracked by guilt at her inability to meet their demands. It is a disturbing account of the mix of dependency and humiliation, resentment and fear that must be experienced by anyone who is enslaved. I think the horror of the story is twofold, firstly a fear of enslavement and powerlessness, but also a fear of becoming 'enslaved' by madness, of losing ones mind.

It is this latter aspect of the story which places it within its time, whereas the feminist aspects of the work emerged over subsequent decades as the hidden voices of the women's movement were increasingly acknowledged, early commentators on the story, as Elaine Hedges' afterword' makes clear, valued the more  'chilling' aspects of the work  rather than its power as social comment. In this respect you can draw parallels between this story and other developments in late nineteenth century art and literature. Wilde's 'Portrait of Dorian Gray' or Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, which both use a central device to chart the effects of psychological disturbance. I am reminded too of the work of Edvard Munch, such as 'Puberty' where dark shadowy interiors hint at inner disturbance, as does the use of colour in later Van Gogh.  These works anticipate the development of Expressionism in the early part of the twentieth century, and in a sense seem more 'modern'' than than the time in which they were produced.

Puberty 
1895; Oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm (59 5/8 x 43 1/4 in); Nasjonalgalleriet (National Gallery), Oslo 

The second short story I looked at was part of preparatory reading for the session on 'creative responses to the source' - Chekov's 'A Lady With A Dog'. Whereas 'The Yellow Wallpaper' concerns derangement grounded in subjugation, Chekov's story charts what might be considered as an arc of sullied redemption. It is narrated mainly through the male character, Dimitri - a well-to-do banker from Moscow on vacation in Yalta.  He is presented as a fairly reprehensible character, charming, vain, dismissive of his wife - who remains in Moscow - a serial adulterer who enjoys the excitement of 'having a fling' but regards women as a 'lesser species'.

He notices a young women walking her dog who appears  to be on holiday alone, so 'arranges' to bump into her, apparently by chance, one lunch time. They become friends, and soon afterwards lovers. Anna, like Dimitri is dissatisfied with her marriage. She seems distant from her husband, who she calls 'a worm'. She is vague about the nature of his job - some kind of 'official' in a provincial town - and the fact that she is holidaying alone points to a less than intimate marriage. Anna's reaction to her infidelity is to become wracked by remorse, but she continues the relationship until the holiday's end.

Somewhat to his surprise over the coming months Dimitri finds, unlike his previous liaisons, he cannot get Anna out of his mind, and finally goes to search her out in her hometown. Though initially shocked to see him at the theatre, Anna agrees to visit him in Moscow on the pretext of needing treatment for a medical problem, The story ends with this arrangement continuing and Dimitri reflecting a little ruefully that finally he has found he is able to love. The ending is inconclusive, both structurally and morally. It is this open-ended' uncertain quality in Chekov's stories which so different to the resolution found in most nineteenth century novels; it influenced  modernists such as Virginia Wolf and Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield who I will look at later.

Adrian, who is leading the session tonight on creative responses to text asked students to produce a diary entry written from Anna's point of view. I don't do creative prose - so produced a short poem that I imagine Anna writing in her diary the morning after she was surprised by Dimitri in the theatre.

 “I will come to you in Moscow.”

- the silliest thing I ever said.

I dreamed I found you in the snow

outside the theatre,  “Go, please go!”

I urged, then promised you instead,

“I will come to you in Moscow.”

I'm on the stage, star of the show,

you, at my feet;  I fear you’re dead.

I dream - “I found you in the snow,”

me singing in shrill soprano,

a sun-kissed Snow Maiden – “unwed,

I will come to you in Moscow.”

I woke, “It’s only you I know,”

I whispered to the empty bed.

No dream: I found you in the snow,

heart shaking, a frozen sparrow

fled from summer’s afterglow. I dread

I will come to you in Moscow,

just to dream I’ll find you in the snow.

It's not quite what Adrian asked for, so I'm not sure how it will go down. I hope the villanelle form captures the obsessive brooding nature of 'not being able to get someone out of your head'. I imagine that Anna would have been shocked by Dimitri's appearance at the theatre and this may have re-occurred as part of her dream. In the dream she has been transformed into the heroine of Rimsky Korsakov's opera 'The Snow Maiden' whose discovery of love unlocks the world from winter, but melts as the first rays of the Spring sun touch her.

Adrian also suggested we look at the work of Katherine Mansfield. I managed to download her complete works on my Kindle for 99p - how's that for a bargain! Katherine's work dates from a few years later than Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Chekov's stories. She was friends with T S Eliot and D H Lawrence and married the writer and editor John Middleton Murry. Katherine's  bisexual and bohemian lifestyle provides the backdrop to many of her stories which seem to simultaneously celebrate yet satirise the life of the early moderns. There are parts of the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and the portrayal of the bedsit scene in section III of the Waste Land that seem to me to owe much to Mansfield.

Compared with Gilman Perkins and Chekov's spare, almost minimalist prose, then Mansfield style is rich, using lavish, detailed description to reveal the intensity of the characters' emotions. It comes as little surprise to read that she admired the Fauves. At times I do find the style over effusive, but this tendency becomes less marked in her later work. A particular favourite on mine is her short story 'Bliss' in which the protagonist, Bertha,  spends her day espousing what a 'divine' life she leads while preparing for a dinner party. She is mysteriously drawn to a beutiful young acquaintance Pearl Fulton and feels they share an inner life. This notion is reinforced that there is a mysterious bond between when, after dinner both find themselves looking  at the pear tree in Bertha's garden, illuminated by the moonlight. The true nature of their shared bliss is only revealed at the very end of the story when Bertha sees her husband embracing Pearl What Bertha and Pearl have in common in reality is the attention of Bertha's husband. Bertha's situation is further complicated by her own feelings of love towards Pearl, which ambiguously provoke a stong physical desire in Bertha towards her husband, whom she previously describes as a 'good pal'.

There are less than twenty years between the wriying of the Yellow Wallpaper and Bliss. One senses in the differing situation of the main female characters a sense of emancipation. It's fair to say however that the behaviour of the male characters changes little, they are partrayed in all three stories as dissmissive of women's feelings at best, and at worst given to infidelity. Is it ever thus?

Research Skills in the Humanities - a reflective report.

 Reflecting upon my knowledge and  research skills in the humanities it is important to acknowledge at the outset the  situation which enabled me to join the Masters course, namely my decision to seek early retirement after a 30 year career in further education.  This has both positive and negative aspects when compared, for example, with a  younger graduate. My skills will be broader and more diverse, but my knowledge of recent developments more limited. These skills have been acquired over time from previous study, work experience and from pursuing personal interests. I propose to look at each aspect in turn.

     Education

My experience  as an undergraduate could be regarded somewhat chequered. I completed two years of a history of art degree at Manchester University, but dropped out for personal reasons.  I completed my B.A. with The Open University in 1982 studying modules in history of art and English Literature . In terms of research skills the experience in each university gave me a grounding in analysing and critically evaluating literary texts and art objects, including architecture, sculpture and decorative arts as well as images. The approach was centred on close analysis of the object  or text and encouraging  objectivity.  The preferred methods were quasi-scientific  and reveal the continued influence of New Criticism and the work of German art historians such as Gombrich and Panofsky.

Completing my studies through open learning undoubtedly improved my skills as an independent learner, however my ‘early exit’ from Manchester combined with the ‘pick and mix’ structure of the Open University programme  resulted in me gaining my first degree without ever being required to develop a research project based on my own interesst or produce a piece of academic writing longer than 3000 words. Furthermore, standards of referencing were much less stringent than now, and this I recognise is an aspect of scholarship that I need to develop.

I then trained as a secondary school teacher, completing my PGCE , specialising in English and History, in 1982. The education course introduced me to theoretical approaches in psychology and sociology and I became particularly interested in the field of humanistic education and ‘de-schooling’. I completed an extended essay for the Children’s Literature module looking at death and resurrection myths in the work of Tolkien,  C.S. Lewis and Ursula le Guin. This allowed me to acquire the skills independent research and experience in structuring a longer piece of academic writing. On obtaining my first teaching post I completed a one year staff development programme at Edge Hill College for new teachers of A Level Media and Communication Studies. This introduced me to methods associated with semiotics and structuralism, particularly the writings of Derrida and Barthes, as well as then recent developments in the UK such as the work of John Berger and the ‘Glasgow Media Group’.

More latterly, in 2010, I commenced an M Ed, with Staffordshire University.  I completed  two,  5000 word  action research projects:  the first investigated the relationship between personal attitudes and achievement amongst Access to Higher Education students;  the second looked into the influence of social media on the learning styles  16 – 19 year old learners on level 3 courses. Both projects involved literature searches and designing qualitative and quantitative research tools and analysing and evaluating results.  I decided, on leaving work, to withdraw from the course having gained a PG Cert.

          Work Experience

My career in Further Education involved me in three main areas: teaching, strategic management and project management.  The latter area is of most relevance to the Masters. Over my career I managed numerous externally funded projects which involved developing skills such as  designing research programmes to a given specification,  undertaking action research and focus groups as well as well as publicising results via reports, journals or organising conferences . All  work was measured and evaluated against KPI’s. The larger projects required me to manage complex processes divided into work packages and manage research assistants and project budgets up to £500,000. Through this activity, and my teaching in Media Studies I have also  developed some skills in the areas of video production and web development.

Personal Interests

Over the past 15 years I have developed a ‘second career’ as a poet, achieving some success in publication and competitions. My work is more concerned with culture rather than nature and so addresses, by different means, ideas and issues which are central to the humanities – place, identity, representation and technology. I am also a keen traveller and believe that going to look for yourself is as important as reading or browsing in understanding the world.  One of my strengths as a student is I enjoy being creative and developing original ideas;  my challenge is to develop a strategy that enables this creativity to be developed within the confines of academic study in general and the structure of this particular M.A.

In terms of what I have learned over the first six weeks, well I have had to adjust to the open nature of the interdisciplinary approach which at first ‘wrong footed’ me. I have come to realise that in the past I have compartmentalised the academic and ‘managerial’ aspects of my personality and my more creative tendencies.  Looking recently at Barthes’ Camera Lucida, I can see how he has integrated personal reflection with critical analysis in a way that enriches both approaches.

T

Camera Lucida

When I signed up for the MA I hoped that I would encounter new ideas and different ways of looking at the world, and indeed I have, particularly in relation to literature in the work of Michel Foucault for example. When we looked at the moving image, using Walter Benjamin's famous essay ' The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I felt on more familiar territory and the additional reading which explored how his ideas of 'aura, cult and exhibition value had been received and developed by early pioneers of Cultural and Media Studies though not familiar, nevertheless fitted easily into my understanding of the analysis of images derived from my History of Art background and some years teaching Media Studies A Level. So, although I could anticipate being challenged by critical theory in literature - by the work of Derrida, Foucault and Braudilliard, I did not expect that anything relating to the visual arts to truly turn my thinking on its head.

Then I read the extended extract from Barthes late work on photography, Camera Lucida, and I did sense a shift of perception, and my approach to studying images, (which I suppose could be described as part early Barthes with a dash of Panofsky, Gombrich and Berger) suddenly seemed open to question. Equally, the ekphrastic poetry I had written over the past twenty years I  began to re-evaluate - more positively I suppose as being worthwhile pieces of analysis rather than mere personal musings. I was excited. I don't do insomnia, but last night I woke at 4am thinking about the Studium and Punctum. Funnily enough every time I thought about the concept of 'punctum', it occurred in my head as punkdom. Whether this was some sort of unconscious acknowledgement of Barthes iconoclastic approach I am uncertain, it was milldy amusing anyway.

I read the extracts just days after having been to the Groeningemuseum in Bruges and the Klee show at the Tate Modern, so, after months of not seeing any paintings I came across Barthes having just had my pictorial imagination seriously stimulated and this I believe helps account for my strong reaction to Camera Lucida.

The thrust of the book, covers many things, it does focus in particular though on speculating why certain details of pictures provoke an unusually strong response in the observer who is 'wounded' by a detail and their mind takes off in unexpected directions - they become 'animated'. The focus on the internal experience of the spectator, the effects of still images on the 'affective consciousness', this runs counter to everything I've learned formally concerning the study of pictures.

My first forays into Art History centred on the fairly informal reading I had to do for A Level Art. For Mr. Fawcett, the art teacher at the grammar school I went to it would appear that Modernism never happened and his contextual lessons stopped dead at Cezanne. The books in the art room shelves were archaic too, but it did mean I became familiar with the thinking of some earlier Art Historians such as Berenson, who acknowledged the 'inner realm' of the spectator in his discussion of such things as 'tactile value' in painting. The other early influence was the BBC series 'Civilisation.' I realise now of course that Kenneth Clark was a highly conservative commentator, but he did introduce me to the forms of categorisation by period, style and genre that underpin much of Art History as a discipline to this day , Through the work of Panofsky and Gombrich, encountered at University these notions were broadened and deepened, by taking into account patronage, function and context into account, as well introducing me to iconography, which may be thought of as a precursor of semiotics. What all of these approaches do is suppress any serious consideration of 'personal response' as a valid area for reflection and promote an objective evaluation of the image in relation to other images - by discussions about style, genre and technique, or attempts to place the work within historical or political context.

What was also significant for me personally is the spirit in which enquiry was fostered. Subject boundaries were sacrosanct and any notion of interdisciplinary approaches regarded as suspect. I have a magpie mind and was prone to falling foul of unspoken niceties of academic decorum. Viewed from the comfort zone of late middle age then these adolescent faux pas seem amusing, but at the time were felt as hurtful. I remember one such incident in a seminar run by the lecturer in Modern Art, Dr. Causley. In a discussion of the sculpture of Giaocometti I put forward an idea that I had come across in the writing of R D Lang - in 'Sanity Madness and the Family' perhaps, that people suffering from schizophrenia sometimes saw the human figure as strangely elongated and the sculptor's work may be inteprated as a vision of the world as in some way 'mad'. Dr. Causley looked at me witheringly and said, "I once had tea with Alberto, and he seemed perfectly well to me". No wonder this gauche, awkward working class kid felt out of place, looking back it seems a miracle that I put up with the place so long, no wonder I dropped out at the start of year three.

In terms of academic content the two Open University modules on The Renaissance and Modern Art I studied a few years later  still had been developed in a world as yet untouched by post modernism, but at least with open learning I did not have to put up with the stultifying effects and bourgeois tendencies of red-brick academia in the 1970's - which was more like 'Lucky Jim' than 'Small World'. It was when I qualified as a teacher and was sent off to be 'developed' as a lecturer in Communication Studies A Level at Edge Hill College that I was introduced to Saussure, Derrida and Barthes and sallied forth to preach the gospel of semiotics to the unsuspecting youth of Skelmersdale. Revolutionary though these ideas are, they do still retain a focus on the cultural object and how signs become mythologised revealing previously hidden hierarchies relating to class, power and gender. To put it in terms of the Camera Lucida, structuralism and semiotics exist in the realm of the studium and in this they have something in common with the more traditional methods of pictorial analysis that I was introduced to as an undergraduate. Why I found Barthes writing in Camera Lucida so liberating is that in developing the notion of 'punctum', Bathes 'legitimises' speculation on how images act upon the spectator in terms of emotional response, in some way rather than being radical, it's old fashioned, a new take on some of the speculation found in in Berenson on the workings of the tactile imagination.

Barthes approach is significant to me as a writer. I've always written poetry, from spotty teenage  to balding middle age, and much more regularly in the past ten years  Some of the work that has been best received has been about pictures - paintings and photographs - ekphrastic verse. I have never felt this to be simply the articulation of a personal response, a kind of art appreciation in verse, I have sensed that in using the sonnet as the primary medium for my ekphrastic musings, that I was undertaking some sort of analysis, but quite what kind of analysis and its relation to my formal education in Art History I have always been somewhat hazy about. Camera Lucida has both helped and challenged me here. It has helped because I can see how the structure of the sonnet allows you to switch subtly from  studium mode to punctum. This has to do with the sonnet's size and structure.

At fourteen lines the sonnet is a short form taking less than a minute to read or the first time. So in some ways it has the pictorial quality of being apprehended quickly , though not quite so instantaneously as a photograph. has is rectlinear shaped is like a picture, it is an objet d'art as well as a text. Sometimes when I am writing, particularly re-drafting I feel that I'm whittling like a wood-sculptor or shaping like a potter molding a lump of clay on the wheel. Equally, however sonnets  are also rhetorical devices, taking in the Shakespearean the of  form an octet and sestet separated by the 'volta' and concluded with a pithy, pointed couplet. Such a tendency  towards order, code and argument lies within the realm of the studium. whereas the shape, the capacity to inhabit the readers mind as an iconic entity edges towards Barthes notion of the punctum:

The effect is certain but unlocateable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself. (Camera Lucida section 22)

The duality of the sonnet form, it's banality as Barthes would say, combined with a pithiness that comes from miniaturism and condensed expression, its capacity for and tradition of indulging in uncalled for rhetorical flourishes make it an ideal analytical  tool to reflect on pictures. It is possible to move from a consideration of the banalities of the studium into reflection on the nature punctum within a small vivid space. Barthes insists that the punctum cannot be named "what I can name cannot prick me' and goes on to assert in section 21 that the 'pricked photograph...is at once brief and active' For Barthes this 'activity' seems incapable of articulation in words. I am not so sure, I think a consideration of this in relation to ekphrastic poetry would provoke an interesting debate.

Barthes talks of the relationship between studium and punctum as follows:

Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).”

Reading Camera Lucida has enabled me to realise why I was drawn to the sonnet to write about pictures, for it allows within, as Wordsworth put it,  'its narrow cell' free reign to the voice of banality and the voice of singularity. So in the example below there is much 'blustering' in the first sonnet concerning the studium - 'the salon', Ingres, and so on, until the writer happen upon the punctum - Olympia's 'sloe-black gaze'. Then something quite extraordinary happens. Barthes, talking about Robert Mapplethorpe's self portrait writes 'it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.' Something similar occurs in these sonnets. It takes until line fourteen of the first poem for the writer to escape the frame and the punctum to materialise. The writer is captivated by Olympia's gaze, but through this process is able to capture what the naked woman sees, not himself, the banal spectator, but the sunny garden in the painting opposite.

Olympia

His ‘yellow bellied odalisque', half painted
half sketched, outraged the Salon's bourgeois passion.
They strung her up well out of reach. Acquainted
with Ingres’ languid goddesses, high fashion
extolled coy Venuses with moist eyes rolling
in servile ecstasy. Olympia’s gaze
confounds voyeurs by craftily controlling
ardent males; drawn by her power to amaze,
they sense too late Manet, not God, created
woman. Anonymous bouquets from doting
suitors, haughtily she ignores. Defeated,
admirers pay out handsomely for nothing:
no painted lady proffers carnal pleasure,
that sloe-black stare remains her only treasure.

Olympia's Reply

All day I watch my onlookers pass by;
I know each one: the quiet connoisseur,
the withering critic and the shy voyeur.
They choose to see behind my hawkish eye
the artist's role, the calculated stare
that seeks delight in mawkish male discomfort.
They cannot own me, though I may be bought,
it's their desire, not mine, that I lay bare.

Admirers, I dismiss with cool disdain.
Instead, all through the empty evening hours,
I contemplate the Monet opposite;
disregarded, I delight in the mundane -
the breezy sky, a garden full of flowers,
and Summer days, eternally sunlit.