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

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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