The View Finder: the Camera as Significal Pedagogue by Jude Chua Soo Men

1772total visits.

Abstract

This paper is intended as an exploratory contribution to the recently retrieved trend in semiotics to relate sign-studies with ethics and values, i.e., ‘semio-ethics’/’significs’, and to suggest how the ‘semio-ethical’ or ‘significal’ consciousness may be educationally enhanced.

In “Designing the camera” I wrote about ways to shape the camera or photography qua sign for semio-ethical purposes.  Victoria Welby spoke of significs not only as a theory of signs, but also as a kind of (moral) educational theory, since she believed that the understanding of signs-in-relation-to-values raised our critical and ethical consciousness. Here I argue and give phenomenological evidence for the claims that the camera is a pedagogical tool just as it enhances significal formation.  But not only that: the camera is a self-automating pedagogical tool; through using it, one is helped to discover the significant point of view.  It is almost as if it automatically unpacks significs, or the semio-ethical consciousness.

Keywords:  photography, significs, semioethics, natural law, moral education

https://doi.org/10.33234/SSR.16.11