Personal photographic project, as part of a workshop with Klavdij Sluban,
Rencontres d’Arles de la Photographie / France, 14-19 July 2014.

The title of my photographic project refers to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and some of his ideas presented in his work Course in Generel Linguistics. The working title of the slideshow [ɡəˈʃpɛnstɐ] is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), an alphabetic system of phonetic notation. The subject of my work is therefore not „Gespenster“ (ghosts) in its semantic field, but [ɡəˈʃpɛnstɐ] the shape of the word itself, freed from its meaning and possible references. Wikipedia states: „According to Saussure, language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides like a coin or a sheet of paper, both sides of which are inseparable: the signifier (French signifiant), the „shape“ of a word, its phonic component, i.e. the sequence of graphemes (letters), or phonemes (speech sounds); the signified (French signifié), the ideational component, the concept or object that appears in our minds when we hear or read the signifier. According to Saussure, the relation between the signifier and the signified is „arbitrary“, i.e. there is no direct connection between the shape and the concept.“

I have photographed objects and places, but the attentive viewer may notice that it is not about these objects and places, but about an inner state. Photography serves as a language whose relations between the signifier and the signified are arbitrary.

[ɡəˈʃpɛnstɐ] (working title), Slideshow, 2014, 03:09