Week Thirteen: Jeff Whetstone

Timothy O' Sullivan 

Combining two vastly different elements of the world into one method and form of creation is an incredible skill to discover and achieve effectively. After attending Wednesday’s lecture given by photographer Jeff Whetstone, I have never been more impressed, infatuated, and bewilder, by one singular artist who was able to do just that. Whetstone has truly jumped boundaries and has created art through the means of another field of study. Jeff Whetstone, a native southerner, graduated in 1990 from Duke University was trained in the practice of zoology. 

The collection of pieces that Whetstone discussed in his lecture, allowed for a strong understand of the expansive variety of images that fall under the same category. Starting with a video piece tilted Drawing E. Obsoleta; he used sixteen-millimeter film that was pushed two hundred percent, which allowed for the removal of shadows to create an optical illusion effect throughout the piece, this video depicts the mountain ranges of North Carolina, with a black rat snake. The Tennessee born artist has combined his skills in zoology and ecology to create photos that highlight the wilderness in its newest definition that consists of the human presence. Gaining inspiration from nineteenth century photographers, including William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and the early works of photographer Roger Ballen, Jeff Whetstone has been able to establish himself as one of the most unique cotemporary photographers.

Whetstone showed several pieces from his collections, including Central Range, New Wilderness, and Post Pleistocene. By choosing these specific selections, Whetstone was able to clearly establish his genre, but also his immense skill in expanding on this topic in so many different formatted images. One in particular that I found incredibly impressive came from his work within the collection, Frame / Ablate. This video piece was made with the use of an electron microscope. Whetstone was simply asked to make art with an incredibly scientific tool, and that he did. Not only did he create a very appealing video piece, he also was able to combine his passion of nature. He used pieces of his own skin that created landscapes underneath the scope. Within one singular piece, Whetstone was able to successfully combine both his fields of study and passion, into one illuminating and unconventional art form.

Jeff Whetstone’s other compilations consisted of tremendous compositions of the integration of humans and nature. In a lecture that went for almost two hours, Whetstone said more about his unique art of photography that could have comprehended, however, after hearing him discuss the elements that made up his Cave collection and his distinguished portraits and landscape of an area that he s so familiar with, but many outsiders aren’t, he truly has to ability to capture a movement that was not planned or set up, but that surrounds us every single day. A significant quote that came from Whetstone’s lecture that I made sure to write in heavy, bolded letters is that the “formal elements are in need of being broken.” As a photographer, I couldn’t be more inclined to emphasize this statement as monumental.  In our environment, everything tends to be static. It is gradually changing, but tends to be viewed in the same way it has always been. With Whetstone, and photography as a whole, we genuinely as artist have the privilege and skill to break that norm and reveal and display the world in a form that not many have witnessed or interpreted in that way before.

Week Eleven: Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author"

Roland Barthes

In Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” written in 1968, the core idea being discussed is the impact of ones work. The author has to account for so many different elements that not only make up the piece, but also permit its growth and perception once it is released into the world. The final product of a piece of art is always considered to be a statement or expression of the one who is creating it. With this idea known, the viewer or reader of the author’s work must not only place him or herself in an unbiased, nonobjective standpoint of recognition, but also find himself or herself in the mind of the creator. Perhaps, this method permits a better form of understanding. However, in this essay, Barthes expresses and examines the multiple characteristics that can go into the appreciation and interpretation of a written work, which can truly translate into the comprehension of an artistic piece as well.

In the first few sentences of Barthes piece, he states that, “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the human person.” The ability to recognize and create self –expression is one that can prove to be quite difficult and only limited to certain individuals. I believe that the individuals that can so strongly do so, express an idea in a method of wide reception, falls under the category of an artist. The author is an artist. Instead of using paint, charcoal, pencil, metal, wood, or a camera, they use words. With this statement, Barthes is recognized that an author as a higher being. This is true in the sense that the author has to ability to influence it’s readers. The author has the skill of choosing specific and distinctive words that are put together to create pages and pages of text that depict stories, ideas, and feelings of the author themselves. I feel when examining an art piece, all these specific distinctions can be processed by the viewer, just as a reader does with a book.

Barthes continues to discuss the author’s purpose and intent throughout this essay. However, when he concludes his ideas, Barthes recognizes the true relation between author and reader. He closes the essay stating that, “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” Barthes closes his piece with this statement to identify that as much as the author as the ability to create a world within a piece of text that can not only connect with an audience, it also expresses the ideas of one singular self, the author. Barthes is acknowledging that even though that is a very powerful element to creation, it is truly the reader that gives the author his or her reason, and the piece as a whole its emphasis. This is true with viewing a piece of art. As much as the artists creates a piece that portrays a meaning that they believe needs to be distinguished, it is the viewer that not only matters in the process of understanding, but also in establishing ones own perception and a wider acknowledgement of the artists possible intent with the influence of ones own ideas.