Studium: A Personal Foundation for Visual Perception

Memory is a personal foundation-without it, one would live in the moment for the moment without a capacity for understanding or ability to produce a standard psychological emotional basis. A life of experiences felt and forgotten, but what good is warmth if it cannot be remembered, reflected upon, comprehended, appreciated? One devoid of a capacity to dwell, to ponder, to understand and relate to those beings around them is one who is not living but simply alive, bounding through existence one forgotten image and one fraction of a melody at a time. Never remorse, never triumph; to forget as quickly as you realize, to never progress because progression requires comparison, and comparison requires two or more stopping points-it must be what Christians would believe to be a life forgotten by God. Like a motion picture whose film is destroyed just as it is shot, life without foundation is one without experience, without emotion; it is not life at all.

"Oh God, allow me to feel!" is what I imagine they would pray if they could. "Let me reflect, let me anticipate, give me the capacity to comprehend comprehension. Give me desire, even if it forever remains unfulfilled. Let my heart be broken just once so I can hold my chest and know what it feels like when it comes back together."

A simple, elementary question of existence helps clarify the matter: is existence worth or not worth the sorrow which accompanies it? Would you choose to be born again, if it were up to you, or would you prefer to be left out of existence altogether? And of course the answer is relative-quality of life, mental stability, current state of mind-but understanding the alternative given earlier (the baseless, inhuman existence of perpetual in/out of experience-if you could ever forgive yourself for classifying less than .0000000000001 seconds of a sight or sound or feeling as an "experience")-would a life of sorrow be preferable to one of absolute ignorance? I have yet to meet anyone whose primary ambition is to live a life dominated by grief, but then again nobody enjoys being excluded from a party-no matter how lame it is. Maybe suicide is the most suitable alternative, like being welcomed to a bad party but leaving early?

"Thanks, but no thanks."

But for the rest of us who have nobly accepted God's challenge and have decided to give life a try, a memory providing a foundation-even if that foundation is "bad" or "unsound" or marred by a mind which thinks badly (the definition of crazy)-is necessary to experience life as the maker of existence designed it. We need memory to work as our basis in understanding life and its concepts, to provide us with an avenue with which to explore methods and interpret what is being conveyed to us and by whom and in what manner and for what purpose. And even as we misinterpret what we see or hear or how we think we understand something (no "A" for effort, but maybe a mid-"C") we still find ourselves able to pull out details which are meaningful and comprehensible to our own person. A thick, difficult poem dealing with sorrow and death may, in its crafty, abstract design, lose its original purpose and enter my mind as one of love and everlasting hope-the process, for me, is not accurate, but at least my process has a method and, with the proper training, can be remedied. Many Christians do not fully understand God and His ways, yet His words help them nonetheless-false worship, maybe, but the effectiveness (assuming the aim is to instill in people a sense of comfort) works much too well to be questioned.

A solid foundation of comprehension is crucial in understanding certain concepts in photography and the relationship between words and images. The "studium," which Roland Barthes describes as an "application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment...but without special acuity," (146) can best be described as the internalized view of a general context-culturally, historically-of any given photograph. Studium depends upon the "rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture" (146) of the person viewing the photograph, which means the studium, for any one given person, depends almost entirely on their personal background, or what their past foundation of ideas and perspectives have trained them to see. A woman on a street in Washington D.C. wearing a yellow hat and holding a black umbrella: the studium is why her clothing and location and approximate date and cultural background and weather and what size building she is before all matter to me. Why are these details important to the photograph, or are they important to it? Are they important because they, at least ostensibly, are not important?

What does this scene portray to me-in all my education and media saturation, what does this setting and focus ultimately trigger in my mind? How does my mind process the image it is shown, and as the image runs the studium process through those predetermined filters and experiences how does my mind ultimately comprehend it? And how would this same series of printed dots be taken when presented to my brother, or my grandmother, or a child raised in New York, or a man walking the streets of Hong Kong, or the president of Albania? We would all see it differently, because our past has so dominated our memory which dominates our present which dominates our future in that it prepares us to see the world and the sights in it through our own unique slanted lens in order to make sense of something which is new and unique to us. A middle-aged woman from Berlin could not see a photo as I could, as her studium-what her past experiences, surroundings and perspectives have trained her to see-is different than mine. My race, my gender, my nationality, my level of education, my social status, my mental makeup-everything about me changes the way I view the world around me, all of it alters my studium.

And as my studium is altered, the manner in which my mind computes, comprehends, and reacts to photographs is altered as well. The photo below, for example: A Bangladeshi girl collects drinking water from a hole in the ground in Dhaka on World Water Day. The United Nations warned that trouble caused by the world's dwindling supply of fresh water will be a major source of conflict in the coming century.

As an American with daily access to running water and adequate plumbing, my personal foundation of perspectives and experiences tell me that this photograph is appalling and unsettling. I see such horrible, unsanitary living conditions as a young child sits inside a filthy hole in the ground (surrounded by trash and mud and assorted garbage) scooping out liquid that their family will put into their bodies in order to stay alive. As a viewer I do not know whether or not this child's family has the means to boil the water to kill germs (or if that would even help in this situation) or if they have no other alternative than to drink it straight from the bottle after they take it from the ground. The studium for me is distant-a distant culture and quality of life far removed from my own, and because of that studium I view the picture with a sense of pity and helplessness and sorrow for the young child who must live in such horrid conditions. Whether or not that is how the photograph was meant to be presented, I cannot say; but the image, when presented to my mind, must pass through the buffer zone between cultures and lifestyles until my own personal studium is realized.

But how would someone with a largely different personal background respond to the exact same photograph? Let us assume the child has an older brother: how would he view the same photograph? His studium would be greatly different than mine. He may see the old watering hole of his youth, where the entire community went daily to get their water and would think of it no differently as we would a sink or bathroom faucet. Growing up in such unsanitary conditions, he may see his brother as clean where someone like me would not, and he would not feel pity or sorrow for the lot of his brother because it is also his own lot and, as he has grown up in and around it, has accepted it as a normal life since he knows no other. He would not notice the dirt and garbage but would notice the manner in which his brother pours the water into the container, or maybe reflect on the difficulty of bending down and scooping water from such a low elevation. Upon viewing this photograph, would this brother's heart skip a beat and fill with sorrow?-or would he simply think, "That's my brother getting water"? I should think the latter.

Whether they are from the same culture or not, people cannot help but see the same exact image differently because, though their studium process is the same, the factors which take part in that process are different. And therefore, people viewing an image in the same room at the same time will reach different conclusions as to the photograph's meaning. Photographers know this, and market certain images to certain groups in certain areas of the world in order to achieve the desired effect to a most optimal limit. The photo above probably would not be shown to citizens in Bangladesh, because (for the less affluent classes) it would not show them a world they did not know and would most likely fail in causing those who viewed the photo to think any differently about life. The photo, clearly, was intended for more affluent cultures (most likely Western) so that it would pack a certain amount of intended shock value and would press viewers to think differently about the lifestyle of those out of everyday sight. The photographer is playing on the cultural studium of the West, cleverly crafting a photo which would produce the desired effect of pity against poverty upon a culture which has the financial means to alleviate it.

Works Cited

Alam, Shafiq. "Water Underground." 2006. Online image. TIME.com. 25 March 2006.

Bartholemae, David and Anthony Petrosky. Ways of Reading Words and Images.

Bedford/St. Martin's, New York, 2003.