Reality and perception

The essay written by Roland Barthes helps us understand photography in a three level perception: linguistic message, coded iconic message, and noncoded iconic message. This reading confused me a little bit, but there were many passages that caught my attention.

Barthes argues, “The photograph, message without a code, must thus be opposed to the drawing which, even when denoted, is a coded message.” (p. 277) Photographs show a complete and pure reality of what the photographer is looking at, and can only be modified by trick effects. Photographs show things how they are. They show pure reality. Drawing is the result of the artist’s perception towards a specific person, object, or place. Drawing doesn’t show all the pieces and parts of the object, it is mainly a representation of the object. We can say that photographs are more complete than drawing because they capture objects, persons, and places as they really are, without changing their characteristics based on the artist perception. When you take a picture of a person, the picture completely represents whom that person is; when you draw a portrait, you are also drawing who that person is, but not neutrally, your perception influences the outcome of the drawing. I’m an artist and that’s why this quote was controversial and hard to understand to me. I believe that when people see a drawing, they can interpret it as they want taking in consideration first the intend of the artist, because what they see is not reality, is the artist’s perception of reality. When you see a drawing you are involved in the artist’s world and reality. When a person sees photography, he can interpret it freely, because a picture is reality, and we can interpret reality as we please. When you see a picture, you are involved in everyone’s reality that can only be changed through perception.

The second idea that I found interesting is that “The variation in readings is not, however, anarchic; it depends in the different kinds of knowledge—practical, national, cultural, aesthetic—invested in the image and these can be classified, brought into a typology.” (p. 280). Once again this quote brings me to the idea of perception. Perception is driving by the things that we have experienced, the places we have visited, the food we have eaten, etc. If a person in any country in America looks at a picture of a Muslim woman, his perception would be totally different of the perception a person from Middle East would have of the same picture. Everybody interprets reality different, and a single picture can have lots of different readings among people, and there is no right or wrong answer because it’s culturally based. This is the positive thing about photography, is like an open-ended question, open to any answer.

This is a picture I took from a sculpture in my trip to Ecuador last year in the museum of Quito called "Museo de la Ciudad".