Adam Fuss And Roland Barthes example essay topic

Life, Love and Death: The work of Adam Fuss Peanut butter and jelly, a common combination of two separate entities, most people have heard of this duo, many enjoy it, but only one manufacturer packaged them together in a handy snack. Much like the tasty treat that is Goobers is the tasty duo of Adam Fuss and Roland Barthes. Two separate men, Adam Fuss and Roland Barthes put together in one reading, complementing and accentuating each other. Fuss and Barthes, they share an interest in photography, they share an interest in the foundation and principles of photography, more over they share an interest in photography that is deeply personal.

Fuss takes the camera out of photography. Barthes takes photography out of art. Both men want to get to the essence of what a photograph is, one by thinking and writing about it and one by doing it. In this paper I will show how Adam Fuss' work matches up with and demonstrates the ideas of Barthes' in Camera Lucida.

I will look at one body of work at a time and show which parts of Barthes' ideas are present in the work, in its creation and its theory. I will start with his first professional body of work, move through to his most recent work and then look back to some of his childhood pictures. Whether Barthes' ideas actually influenced Fuss' work I am not sure of, I have not found any text or interview that leads me to believe that it is, however I would not be surprised if it has. Camera Lucida was Roland Barthes' last written piece, published posthumously in 1980.

This book deals with the topic of photography and the death of Barthes' mother in 1977. The role of photography is questioned; he asks what about photography makes it a valid media? We read about the operator (the photographer), spectrum (the subject) and spectator (the viewer), also about the stadium (what we see in the photograph) and the (the unclassifiable, the thing that makes the photograph important to the viewer). According to Barthes the photograph is an adventure for the viewer, but it is ultimately death, the recording of something that will be dead after the picture is taken. This idea is the main focus of Barthes' writing, the photograph "that-has-been", in Latin ": what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject; it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred" (Barthes, 76).

This topic of life and death in photography is what connects Barthes with Fuss and makes Fuss' work easier to understand. "The Photograph's essence is to ratify what it represents" (Barthes, 1981, 85). This idea is the foundation upon which Adam Fuss has built his career. From childhood to his most recent works Fuss has created photographs that are statements of being. These photographs do not hide what they are; they are bold in their content, yet subtle in creation and meaning. The theme of life and death is woven into the whole of Adam Fuss' work, in his earliest childhood photographs, his early pinhole camera prints and his extensive body of photogram's.

This theme seeps into his work through the method as well as the material, through the stadium and the (Barthes, 26). If the photograph's essence is to ratify what it represents, then the photogram's essence is to ratify what it is. The photogram, by its nature is an index of a thing; there is a one to one ratio between the subject and the photogram. There is no way to enlarge or reduce the size of a photogram because each piece is unique, unlike camera and film photography that can be reproduced without end. Fuss' early photogram's, made between 1988 and 1992, deal with water and its movement, rippling water, a few beads, a bucket of water crashing down on the paper surface and the wake of a snake's movement. Water is not only a symbol of life, but the water in these photogram's is in motion, alive in its activity.

An untitled triptych made in 1991 is composed of three separate photogram's of water crashing onto the paper's surface, next to these in Fuss' 2003 catalogue is a piece entitled Arc (1988) which is composed of three ripples stretching to the edges of the paper with several tightly clustered concentric ripples in the center. These pieces comment on the same idea, the death of the motion. The viewer sees the record of the water, but we know that it is gone; the motion ended a few seconds after it began. Similarly the snake photogram's of 1988 and 1998 record the movement of a snake in water. The snakes are now dead; their wake is no longer rippling outward. We cannot create the moment again, or make a copy of the photogram because it is a unique piece that has no negative to reproduce; it is Barthes'.

In 1992 Fuss began his Details of Love series, his most controversial work to date. Featuring rabbit entrails these pieces resemble the action paintings of Jackson Pollock, their abstract content and vibrant colors create dynamic compositions that are very appealing. Fuss places the fresh entrails of a rabbit onto the photographic paper and lets the composition sit for a few days before exposing them. These photogram's are made through the chemical reactions of light on paper, but also through the enzymes and acids of the entrails of his subjects reacting with the paper. Fuss first discovered this chemical reaction when one of the snakes in his earlier work relieved itself on the paper and created a bright orange streak when the paper was developed. This method places Fuss' work in alignment with Barthes' idea that photography is not an art of the camera obscura but of the chemical process.

Photography is not like painting and drawing where the artist can manipulate and create freely through time, photography is a whole other being where through chemical reactions one can capture an exact moment in time visually. Fuss takes this one step further and not only does he capture the image, that is to say the light bouncing off of the subject, but the subject itself captures its image through its direct interaction with the paper. Fuss captures the death of the animal, and the death of the photograph as an active participant in the decay of an animal. Through this the viewer is left with a work of art that, while brightly colored and vibrant, is deeply contemplative. The viewer contemplates the rabbits, their gift of themselves for the piece. In one piece, entitled Love (1992), the rather common animals are laid out, facing one another with their entrails creating a "tree of life" (Kellein, 2002, 14) around them in rich purples, golds and reds.

Their images are unfocused; they seem to be slipping out of our sight, a comment on the fragility of life and the solitude of death. This idea of solitude and death is most readily seen in Fuss's eries entitled My Ghost. The images of baby clothes, weeping women and birds in flight have a cool, detached feeling, yet their delicacy and their connections to Fuss' childhood create a narrative that captures the sadness and solitude, perhaps not of death, but of the passing through life to death. The baby clothes sit in a solid black field and appear like x-rays of the garments. The delicacy of the embroidery and the seams give structure to the gauzy, translucent fabric that appears to float above the paper. Fuss' father made high-fashion ladies coats and may have made these clothes for Fuss as an infant.

When Fuss was two years old his father suffered a stroke that left him in need of constant care and in 1968 his father died when Fuss was seven years old. These pieces of clothing may be one reminder of Fuss' father, a symbol of his childhood spent with a very sick father. As a result of his father's death Fuss' mother moved back to her native country, Australia, and brought Adam with her. After a brief stay they moved back to England where Fuss was more comfortable. His grieving mother often brought clairvoyants into their house in an attempt to contact her deceased husband, this belief in mysticism greatly affected Fuss, opening another world to him as a child. My Ghost feels mystical, Fuss' baby clothes have a ghostly aura, they float in a black void and resemble Killian photographs, where one can supposedly visually capture the life force and phantom limbs of inanimate objects.

The weeping women in the series glow, their hot white mass seems to contradict their sorrowful poses, hunched over, head in hands. Perhaps this is the way Fuss remembers his mother, the widow with a small child desperately trying to contact her deceased husband looking for comfort. The women in these pieces are faceless, unidentifiable; the viewer cannot connect to these pieces through recognition of a face or personality. We have no information about these women, we do not know who they are or why they are crying, the only thing Fuss lets us see is their emotion. Instead of letting himself become attached to the physicality of his mothers being, as so many photographs rely, as Barthes admits of his own photographs, Fuss distills what he wants to show to his viewers and presents only this. As a result his weeping women become universal, these women could be part of anyone's past, anyone's Ghost.

These pieces solve the puzzle that Barthes gives the reader, how does one avoid the stadium yet create a universal in a photograph? Barthes discusses a photograph of his mother that he believes captures most accurately his mother's being. This photograph he calls The Winter Garden and it is a photograph of his mother when she was a young girl. There is nothing special about the photograph, if we did not know who the girl was we would have no interest in the photograph at all. This is a problem that Barthes identifies in most photography, a dependence on the stadium to carry the interest instead of the form and the.

Fuss avoids this in his pieces; he uses only a gesture as stadium and lets the viewer interpret it in the context of the whole series. Where Fuss uses photography to document his past in My Ghost, much like the man Barthes describes as having gotten into photography to photograph his son, Fuss started out early on in his life not documenting things but ideas. At a young age Fuss set fire to a toy airplane and crashed it into his mother's daffodils, he photographed the incident, not as reckless behavior, but as a visual documentation of an idea, of a cause and an effect. This became his working mode in his professional career, creating cause and effects that become interesting visual documents. Fuss' water photogram's and snake photogram's, previously discussed, demonstrate this most clearly. Other photogram's that demonstrate this are Fuss' richly colored light pieces where Fuss suspended a light source from a string and recorded its path as it swung in circles around the paper.

One area that Barthes would find troublesome in Fuss' work would be his color photogram's. Barthes discusses the use of color as an after-the-fact addition that distracts from the nomen (that-has-been). Barthes discusses how the entrapment of light emitted from the subject creates a connection to the viewer through light, and when color is added this connection is severed. In Fuss's eries Details of Love Barthes may change his mind about color, through chemical reactions from the subject directly with the paper Fuss creates color.

This color is not added later, the color we see is the connection to the viewer from the subject. Other color pieces made by Fuss would fall into this exception, especially his sunflower pieces. These photogram's were made by laying sunflowers on paper and exposing them just as any other photogram would be exposed. These pieces capture the warm yellow orange of the sunflower and the mossy green of the leaves. Fuss does not meddle with the color; it is a true recording of the flower. Fuss seems to use color only when appropriate, in the My Ghost series he avoids color photography because he was "attempting to create again something which has been lost" (Kellein, 9), as Barthes would say, something "that-has-been".

This idea of holding onto the past, making a particular point in time eternal is quite contradictory to the photograph, it being a piece of paper that will quickly yellow and disintegrate. Barthes questions this role of photography; he compares it to the great monuments of the past, which were built to outlast the person or event it commemorates by centuries. He compares our reliance on the photograph to our society, how we have invented both photography and history, yet photography, the media of history will not last throughout time. This paradox is shown in Fuss' pinhole camera pictures of the sculptures and buildings of the Museum of Modern Art, the Louvre, the British Museum, Versailles and Rome's Museo Capitoline. Fuss documents these lasting institutions, the monuments of our time with the perishable photograph.

The images emerge from the darkness giving the sculpture and architecture a ghostly feeling and an importance of being. In this paper I have shown how Adam Fuss' work matches up with and demonstrates the ideas of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. I have taken each body of work and have shown parts of Barthes' ideas that are present in this work. Barthes' idea that photography captured the life and death of the subject can be seen in Fuss' water works from 1988 through 1992. Fuss' Details of Love demonstrate photography's origin in chemistry, not the camera obscura of painting, an argument that Barthes makes in his writing. Many ideas come together in My Ghost, the theme of life and death, the importance of over stadium, and the universality of the photograph.

Fuss avoids using photography as a way to hold on to the past, a problem that Barthes warns us about, by using it to document ideas and cause and effect. Barthes also warns us about color, but Fuss uses color judiciously and naturally in his work. Whether Barthes' ideas actually influenced Fuss' work I am not sure of, however the similarities and differences between both men's work suggest that Fuss has indeed been either directly or indirectly influenced by Roland Barthes' Camera Obscura.

Bibliography

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