RIchard Avedon and Barthes

Last night, while watching Videofashion recapping some of the past week’s fashion shows, I saw a segment on the Richard Avedon photography exhibit at the I.C.P. Avedon, an exceptional photographer, is most known for his fashion photography, although he started originally started photographing returning Merchant Marines after World War II. One of Avedon’s most famous images, which they featured in the segment is “Dovima and the Elephants.” The image was in the August 1955 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Although this image isn’t iconic, because it doesn’t refer to something outside of its individual components, and doesn’t have a great symbolic meaning for a lot of people, I have always been drawn to it for various reasons. I enjoy the whimsical juxtaposition of the dainty, graceful Dovima, in her black and white ensemble with the playful, enormous elephants. I find it interesting that her expression is vaguely snooty, yet she is in standing on hay between two wrinkly seemingly dirty animals. She makes it look as though thinking this scenario is anything but commonplace would be ridiculous.
I understand that fashion editorial photography may be seen as frivolous, lacking depth, therefore unworthy of academic study, however I think that this image can be studied through studium and punctum, two of Roland Barthes terms from his concept of the Myth of the Photographic truth. The studium is the truth function of the photograph, the idea that an event took place in a particular way and in a particular time. For this photograph, the studium can be seen as a wealthy, thin, glamorous woman in an evening gown and gloves posing with two happy elephants in a pen with dirt and hay. However, the woman “Dovima” was actually born Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba, in New York City, contracted rheumatic fever at age 10, and seldom left the house for much of her adolescence and young adulthood. The story of the woman in the image conjures a very different mental image than the image of the woman in the picture. The punctum is the emotional factor of an image, and Barthes used it to “characterize the affective element of those certain photographs that pierce one’s heart with feeling.” (Sturken & Cartwright, 19) Essentially I described the punctum of this image in the previous paragraph. It is also important to realize that it is because of these contrasting concepts that the myth of the photographic truth occurs according to Barthes.