A LOVER'S COMPLAINT

The French philosopher and writer Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) published his ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ in 1977. It consists of 80 ‘Fragments’, or short chapters, as a personal and philosophical exploration of the anatomy of desire and love.

Henry Gough-Cooper has taken these ‘Fragments’ and distilled each of them into haiku.

As a response to these, Robin Gillanders has made a series of still life photographs (which themselves may be termed ‘visual haiku’) as a further representation of Barthes’ text via Gough-Cooper’s verse.

Barthes is of particular importance to photographic artists since he has written at length about the medium and the relationship between the ‘actual’, ‘symbolic meaning’ and ‘subjective interpretation’. In other words, how the photograph transparently records what’s there, while symbolising something intangible and unphotographable, and which in turn requires personal interpretation. 

“Photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant…”, Roland Barthes

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What follows is a small selection from the  64 photographs and 30 haiku in the original book and exhibition.