Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
La Chambre Caire: Note sur la photographie = Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes

Camera Lucida is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «اتاق روشن: تامالاتی درباره‌ عکاسی»؛ «اتاق روشن: اندیشه‌ هایی درباره‌ ی عکاسی»؛ نویسنده رولان بارت؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش و نگرش ماه اکتبر سال2001میلادی

عنوان: اتاق روشن: تامالاتی درباره‌ عکاسی؛ نویسنده: رولان بارت؛ مترجم فرشید آدرنگ؛ تهران، ماه ریز، سال1379؛ در175ص، مصور؛ شابک9647049404؛ موضوع عکاسی هنری از نویسندگان فرانسه؛ - سده20م

عنوان: اتاق روشن: اندیشه‌ هایی درباره‌ ی عکاسی؛ نویسنه: رولان بارت؛ مترجم: نیلوفر معترف؛ تهران، چشمه، سال1380؛ در144ص، مصور؛ شابک9643620077؛

رولان بارت، در پس علاقه‌ اش به عکس و عکاسی، اندیشه‌ های خویش را، در کتاب «اتاق روشن»، به رشته‌ ی نگارش درآورده اند؛ این کتاب دارای دو بخش جداگانه است؛ در بخش آغازین، «بارت» کوشش دارد: ویژگی‌های عکاسی را به زبانی ساده بیان، و تعیین هرگونه رده‌ بندی، برای این هنر را، نفی می‌کنند، و در جستجوی خاستگاه این نظم‌ ناپذیری هستند؛ در بخش دوم «رولان بارت»، در پی این هستند که: به خویشتن خویش، رجوع کنند؛ به همانجایی که سرچشمه‌ ی دریافت‌های ایشان از عکس‌های متفاوت است؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 08/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 30/11/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Steven Godin

Rating: really liked it
In Camera Lucida, literary theorist, philosopher, and linguist Roland Barthes attempts to find the essence of photography and how photography affects him as the spectator of photographs. It also serves as a poignant eulogy to his mother, who passed away in 1977, and he shows a grieving pain that is reflected throughout Camera Lucida. Barthes himself lost his life three years later, after being knocked down by a van whilst walking to his Parisian home.

Barthes approaches his analysis of photography in two parts - he first focuses on defining a structuralist approach to finding the essence of photography before he evaluates the photographic referent, and how photography is somehow representative of death - the 'past reality'. He even describes photographers as agents of death, and whilst looking for his mother in old photos he always reminds the reader that this essay carries with it a more personal evaluation.

In short - it is a book about photography, but one linked with the subjects of love and grief.

Although Camera Lucida is seen as a highly influential book on the subject. it's overall nature remains somewhat obscure, just what exactly does one learn from reading it? Barthes certainly shrinks from being comprehensive, with no interest in the actual techniques of photography, in arguments over its status as art, nor really in its role in contemporary media or culture.

What, then, was Barthes looking for when he studied certain photographs? he goes about elaborating a distinction between two planes of the image. The first, which he calls the studium, is the manifest subject, meaning and context of the photograph: everything that belongs to history,
culture, and even to art. The second he calls the punctum: that aspect, often a small detail, of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty.

For all his dense philosophizing, he does embrace the subject matter with much heartache, making Camera Lucida a deeply moving read. The old photographs that are appear every so often, gives the sense that for Barthes its like a memorial, the very essence of the medium is its spectral conjuring of death-in-life. In fiction, the late WG Sebald owed a profound debt to Camera Lucida; in Austerlitz, the protagonist's search for an image of his lost mother is clearly modelled on Barthes's desire for a glimpse of 'the unique being'.

Ultimately, Camera Lucida is not the definitive reappraisal of photography that was probably expected by many a reader. It doesn't reveal itself to be the long-sought grammar of photographs. It is though intimate and soul-stirring, not just academic and theoretical, as Barthes bites into photography like Proust into a madeleine, and the result is an intricate, quirky, and affecting meditation, fusing together photography and death.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
A free-floating essay in two parts, each examining the essence of photography through the lens of the writer’s relationship with his late mother. In contrast to Sontag’s On Photography, this is relaxed, conversational, and personal, more concerned with exploring what makes photographs so compelling than building a complex argument about the history and ethics of photography. The work’s witty and sharp, and invites rereading.

David

Rating: really liked it
For Barthes, every photograph, rather than being a representation, is an expression of loss. The photograph, like all art which precedes it, attempts to eternalize its subject, to imbue it with life-forever, to blend the beautiful with the infinite; but it fails, it reminds us only of mortality (death is the mother of beauty). Try though it may, and despite its resemblance to life, the photo can never extend a life which is lost, or a life which is passing.

I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

I think of the vain art of aesthetic preservation at the end of Lolita: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Humbert has failed to give his Lolita immortality, she is dead and gone from him forever, even when her life remains throbbing in her veins, Humbert's Lolita is dead to him, passed, and that is the effect of photography: a vain snatch at passing beauty. For Barthes, the photograph is irrevocably the servant of Time, the momentary click of the photographic instrument is the shuddering tick of time, as the photograph-frozen object dies away - the object that-has-been (ça-a-été) dies away every indivisible moment and is born over in what-is-now. Barthesian Time, for the photograph, is instant death. What has been photographed can never occur exactly the same way, for that momentary coincidence is past, but in the photograph it is falsely repeated infinitely. Every photograph is an epitaph.

For Walter Benjamin too, as with his successor Barthes, the clicking-photo and the ticking-time are inseparable melodies of the same fugue. He tells us: "...image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical..." The image exists extemporally, but it is helplessly pinioned to the edifice of time. Every momentary photo has a following moment which is unphotographed, and another and another through infinite moments until Now. From the singular snap of the camera, there is an infinity of moments, a constant constellation across time, bridging the distance between what-is and what-was. And as Barthes notes, that distance is immeasurable, it is infinite: you can never retrieve, never relive, that which has passed, that which is gone, that which is dead. The shock, the punctum of a photo, is a "posthumous shock" as indentified by Benjamin:

Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the 'snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.

Throughout, Barthes provides us with a number of photographs which touch, or fail to touch, him. No matter the photographic subject: political, journalistic, personal, professional or amateur: Barthes approaches each with a reverence and solemnity, like a man walking through a cemetery: head downcast, hands intertwined, heart in his throat. Despite the many provided photographic examples, the photo which moves Barthes, and which most moves the reader, is not included, and it exists to us only in Barthes' words: the photo of his mother as a child. This photograph belongs to a history which excludes him, which is totally unfamiliar to his image-repertoire because it is outside of Time as he knows it. This image is a private history, but a privacy which is removed from his own, irremediably by time and space. And he sees in her image that-which-was and simultaneously that which has died and that which is going to die. The girl in the photo is gone, but the woman she has become has a limited mortality of her own, and the photo is a death-knell calling her to the grave, calling her back to the history which she has left behind her.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Every photo is a commingling of love and death, a realm of life lost and life left for losing. There is a beauty in life which is lost when it pinned down in art, art of any kind, but especially Photography. While literature, painting, drawing, music, all take life and attempt to pin it down, they also add something that life hadn't had before. In photography, nothing is added, it is frozen life, it is death, there is nothing which supports it, nothing which adorn it, we see nothing added, we are only reminded of what has been removed.

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

Calvino warns us that "memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased" and that is the operation of photography: to erase memory, to anesthetize it, kill it. The photograph is a conscious attempt to remember, but it cozens us, it tricks us, and it makes us forget. I defer again to Benjamin, in his essay on memory in Proust:

When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

Our purposive remembering, our memories which we force-fit into words, into images, die - they are no longer what they were, they have been forced to change mediums, and something is lost: the beauty of life. The photograph only appears a representation of reality, it is only, rather, an expression of loss, of what can never be again. It is often in art that the afflatus of creation is to exorcise, to kill away, that which burns inside the artist, to cleanse the spirit of the past. But there is a danger in this, in the abundance of photography, that our memories will become extinct.

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Photographs, unlike other arts, are too immediate, seem too real (though they are unreal): the kill memory forever. Photographs do not shut the eyes, but gouge them out: we become Oedipus fleeing reality as it is, in a vain blindness which forces us to remember only what we hoped to lose, and lose only what we hoped to remember.

Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no on in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.

Luís

Rating: really liked it
Thanks to Roland Barthes!
He made me understand what photography is in its natural dimension, beyond technique. It is a state of mind, the device being only the extension of the eye. The important thing is to learn to SEE before handling the lens, affirm a REGARD that arises on the mundane things of life, and feel a framing that questions! Dig a surprising subject! Watch intelligence and build a deep, self-evident image. The unique one!
Instinct turns out to be a visual set-top box, creativity a sensor of every moment, living a natural photographic trance! The "film" or digital photo? It's constant apnea for all the senses.

Prerna

Rating: really liked it
What has always terrified me about photography is, as Barthes puts it (since I never could, not before this book anyway,) the infinite reproduction of a singular event. Evanescent instances that would have normally escaped my own memories, are now confined within a frame. A part of my existence that eludes my comprehension is now externalised, solidified and made to appear more real than the event itself was. In this sense, the etymology behind 'capturing' moments in photographs interests me a lot. 'Capturing' is always an act against a will.

'The look, the see, the here it is' that Barthes talks about only ever makes me scrutinize a photograph and then avert my gaze - sometimes in embarassment and sometimes in terror. Because Here It Is. Is it? If so, what is the true nature of the essence captured by the photograph that insists on being looked at, that marks its presence? The appearance does not coincide with the essence, no. It goes even deeper, into those niches of my consciousness that essence could never reach. 'I' is reduced to a reference.

I avert my gaze, close my eyes and walk away, only to know myself better and to feel that I am hollow. All of the world's photographs form a labyrinth, all of the photographs I view form a labyrinth of echo-less chambers that converge at me.

So yes, with each photograph captured I experience a micro version of death. It is exhilarating and numbing all at once.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
This was the last book written by the renowned French master of linguistic semiotics and literary criticism before he died in 1980. It is a short (120 page) exploration of the unique qualities of photography compared to other forms of representation. The book was a rewarding book for me to think about photography in unfamiliar ways. I ended up making friends with the paradoxical concept that photographs do their magic by authentically capturing “what has been” while at the same time demonstrating in a sense the death of their subject. Photographers often work hard to make their subject “lifelike”, yet with the snap of the shutter whatever was real is frozen in its moment, pinned immobile, and present becomes irrevocably past.

This was most poignant by his search among his family pictures for one of his dead mother that might evoke her presence for him (he lived with her his whole life). Time after time shots he found of her failed to do the trick:

I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography therefore compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. …
The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status—which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother … I dream about her, I do not dream her.

Finally, he finds a shot of his mother as a girl in the garden, which bears somehow in her eyes an assertion of innocence, as in “I do no harm”:
In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone …just an image, a just image.

Barthes never does share the picture of his mother (he valued his privacy too much). He does show a picture of the photographer Felix Nadar’s mother from 1890 that might have done the trick for that pioneer.



Personally, I tend to shoot only landscapes. But I can appreciate the power and impact of an evocative portrait. Arnold Newman is a favorite for capturing something of the accomplishment or character of a person. Among the 20 or so photos Barthes includes in the book is one by Richard Avedon, “Born a Slave”, which for him becomes “the essence of slavery laid bare” and illustrates how the concrete can stimulate larger meanings:



Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask. It is this word that Calvino correctly uses to designate what makes a face into the product of a society and of its history.

In his own empirical journey in looking at photos to discover something of the “essence” of Photography with a capital “P”, he finds a dynamic between generic meanings (which he often finds ”banal”) and a more idiosyncratic element. He came to appreciate a division between an “average affect” for a general field of cultural meaning associated with a photo, to which he applies the Latin word stadium, and a second element he terms punctum, “which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” For example, a 1920s portrait of a family of blacks in their Sunday best clothes speaks to him of various sociological aspects of moderate interest, but for some reason the high belt and Mary Jane shoes of one of the women arouses a special sympathy and tenderness in him. In another example a shot of a blind gypsy with a violin being led across a road by a small boy “punctures” Barthes through a background element, the texture of the road reminding him powerfully of all his own past experiences traveling through rural villages of Hungary and Romania.

For the most part Barthes coverage of photography is personal and accessible, not abstruse and academic. Because of the importance of individual emotional response to photographs, Barthes did not feel subjecting the art form to a formal analysis with his methods of phenomenology or dissection of its place in aesthetic philosophy would be fruitful. He puts you at ease by admitting naivete about theories of photography and steers you clear of high-flown discussions and criticism of photography as art. Thus, for me the book has the pleasing quality of exploration with me as a reader in hand, and it pays off with a sense of discovery rather than persuasion and erection of a new dogma. His writing style includes lots of parenthetical insertions that have the feel of hypertext. He also uses colons and semicolons in nearly every sentence, which carries a sense of a logical unfolding of ideas like Russian nesting dolls.

I was moved most when Bathes marvels at the world-changing novelty of photography when it was invented by Niepce in the 1820 and reaches for poetic metaphors. I leave you with some choice quotes:
The first photographs a man contemplated …must have seemed to him to resemble certain paintings …; he knew, however, he was nose-to-nose with a mutant (a Martian can resemble a man); his consciousness posited the object encountered outside any analogy, like the ectoplasm of “what-had-been”: neither image nor reality, a new being really: a reality one can no longer touch.
…
The Photograph … becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it indeed has been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.
…
It seems to me that in Latin “photograph” would be said “imago lucis opera expressa”; which is to say: image revealed, “extracted”, “mounted,” “expressed” (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light. And if Photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to myth, we should exult over the richness of the symbol: the loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver (monument and luxury); to which we might add the notion that this metal, like all metals of Alchemy, is alive.

Zanna

Rating: really liked it
I'd never thought much about Barthes method until I read Sara Ahmed's book Queer Phenomenology in which she draws attention to the labour that enables Husserl to sit and think at his table; the work of childcare and table clearing performed, probably, by women. Ahmed has inspired me to ask what Barthes is doing here, and Barthes has helpfully told me; he is forthright; perhaps that is why I find his writing appealing; I am engaged by honesty and directness. He looks at photographs; he thinks about photographs, and he writes whatever occurs to him that seems worthy of sharing. Strange to think that this text, famous, influential as it is, has such a personal origin, that a single standpoint can be taken as universal. I was awake to this when I read Barthes' reflections on being photographed 'I play the social game... [preserve my] essence of individuality'. I felt the contrast with images of fashion models, who are anonymous matter, utile bodies. And female celebrities: their 'essence of individuality', for the public, is built through repetition, the ubiquity of their images eventually persuades us of their reality beyond the image. The more beautiful the woman is judged to be, I think, the less individual she is, the more anodyne her image, her expressionless face... He says, parenthetically, discontinuously 'it is my political right to be a subject that I must protect'. I want to follow this thought - but he drops the trail, leaves it to others (feminists?) to pick up and consider the costs, the consequences...

Barthes considers what constitutes his interest in, his feelings about photographs, and distinguishes two classes of effect (or affect) they produce - a 'slippery, irresponsible' sort of general interest produced by the image's relation to fields of knowledge, culture, experience, curiosity, which he calls studium, and a piercing, emotional jolt that he calls punctum, a kind of realisation that there is life beyond the frame, but more than this, maybe even 'Pity' because the photograph speaks always of death (but for other reasons, because Barthes chooses photographs like Richard Avedon's devastating photo of William Casby 'Born a Slave', and one of a Black family whose trappings of 'respectability' induce 'Pity' in Barthes because he reads, reductively, a hopeless aspiration to Whiteness. Race thus becomes a painful emotion felt and mediated by the White viewer - Barthes describes it variously as wound, madness, ecstasy - he remembers Nietszche's 'pity' for a horse.)

After reflecting at length on a photograph of his mother as a child, he reflects at length on photography's defining feature, the 'this-has-been' it offers that is incontrovertible. He predicts that the astonishment at this will vanish, and I think he is right, but for more reasons than he anticipates, because hasn't the cultural status or the location of the photograph changed with the advent of social media? In this context great numbers of people quite habitually make photographs, and while we perhaps still mainly look at photographs while alone, we do not do so in the same kind of privacy as Barthes speaks of, and we very often look at photographs that are not our own. Perhaps all this belongs to the sociological fluff that Barthes is not interested in (the assertion he makes that there are few books on photography is no longer true!), but it seems to me that updates are in order. The transition from private to public, the arrival of celebrity culture, that the photograph attended, have passed into new stages in the digital age. Nonetheless, I think Barthes makes an enduring point about the photograph as a document impinging on time, on the sense of time, as the photograph as measurement and memento mori. 'Death must be somewhere in a society', Barthes insists, and yes, I think it is still in our personal photographs, little piping voices telling us life is precious...

Trevor

Rating: really liked it
This is a curious little book, and it really is a little book – only 119 pages. It is curious because it is two books. The first is a kind of philosophical discussion on the nature of photography. He says many very interesting things here – interesting in a philosophical kind of way. He starts with the basics and works his way up from there. For example, he says we can have three relationships to photographs: we can take them (he doesn’t take them so he has virtually nothing to say about this), we can be in them (and this is interesting, as having our picture taken means to pose – so what is it that we are seeing when we see a photo of ourselves?) and finally we can look at photographs (even if we are a super model this is surely our most frequent experience of photography). This last relationship of us to the photograph is what most of both parts of this book is about.

Rather than summarising this book I’m going to talk about some of the things that stopped me while reading it, that is, the things that made me think and then where those thought took me.

Firstly, I have to say that I’m not sure I fully agree with him – it is hard to say because some of the things he says I didn’t quite follow and so my criticisms may just be due to my not reading him closely enough. He repeatedly says that there is a kind of banality to photography. A photograph shows what was there. There is a lovely bit where he says that a photograph is like Cassandra – the woman Apollo gave the gift of prophesy to, but when she still wouldn’t have him as her lover he twisted the gift so that no one would ever believe her prophesies. We know photographs speak the truth, but often we are dumbfounded by the truths they say – photographs are Cassandras with their gaze fixed on the past. I really like that image. How often have we seen a photograph of ourselves or of a loved one years after it was taken only to realise our memories are out of joint? That some sequence of events must be wrong? ‘How can she be wearing that necklace then?’

The problem I have with his view is that I don’t believe photographs are simply the slices of time he makes them out to be. He sees photographs as graveyards for light. Open the shutter and the light that is reflected from a surface (the apple in a bowl of fruit or the half-turned smile of a loved one) reacts (chemically or electrically) with the mechanism so as to effectively freeze that light in time. We literally have the power to stop time, we new gods. Images, as he says, are a kind of death – and in a sense photographs are always about death, even within the minute they are taken, they immediately become about ‘then’. There is a sense in which the truest thing that can be said about a photograph is ‘this is what was’. But this view is only partly true. Photography is also about selection – it is always a chosen truth. Photography is also about artifice – it is about adjustments to lighting and focus that manipulate the truth of the image. And today, with photoshop, it is hard to know what we are looking at when we look at a photograph.

I have never been to New York. My only knowledge of the city comes from books and photographs and motion film. Could it be that the city itself does not exist? That the Twin Towers collapsing was really a huge fabrication in an international scale version of the Truman Show? Probably not. But then, I’ve also seen photographs of nuclear and biological war facilities in Iraq, with their storage tanks and their reinforced concrete walls, and what was black and white before the war was somehow to become shades of grey after, so who is to say? It is not just that we get to choose what to point the camera toward that is an ideological decision, but how we go about reading photographs is also deeply ideological.

I quite like the idea of the USA being a hugely expensive version of the Truman Show – let’s face it, it does offer the most satisfactory explanation for Rick Perry I can come up with, so I think I’m going to just go with it.

Barthes says that photographs can’t really be categorised and that there is a kind of surface meaning to photos that he refers to as studium, as a kind of study. This is our cultural understanding of photographs, what we feel when we see an image of nuns walking behind a group of soldiers on patrol. He doesn’t say this, but it is almost our rational brain that processes these images. But then there is what he calls punctum. This is something about the image that stops us. An example might help. There is a photo here of a young boy and in the photo an adult is playfully pointing a pistol at this young boy’s head. But Barthes says when he sees this photograph all he really sees is the boy’s bad teeth. The studium is basically ‘staged’ – the punctum is a kind of truth that just is. The punctum stops us, but it is rarely the key ‘message’ of the photograph.

The second half of this book is about him considering photographs of his mother and is quite moving. Looking for a photograph that has a dual impact on him – one that makes him feel it shows his mother as she was and also brings her back to life again. Obviously, such photographs are rare. I think this is because we aren’t quite ourselves when we pose for a photograph. Such photographs are self-conscious and so can never be essentially us. But there is a lovely line I read somewhere – that great photographs are never taken, but are given. Given, that is, by the subject. As someone who has often been the subject of photographs, a particularly self-conscious subject too, I find I’m rarely happy with the images taken of me – or even of the ones I try to ‘give’. So few of them look anything like I think I look like. I believe this is because I mostly only see myself straight-on. When photos are not taken as direct mirror shots they stop looking like me – the me I generally see is the face-to-mirror angle me – no other. But then, our self-image has a lot in common with photographs – neither age well with time. I suspect the image we carry of ourselves in our heads is a kind of photo taken at about 20. Comparisons between this image the person in photos and mirrors and in other people’s appraisals of us never fails to surprise us (well, if we are lucky surprise is the right word).

I enjoyed this a lot. But the best of this was my confusion over this photo.
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I still find it hard to believe this guy lived in 1865 rather than 1965.

Oh, and his line that to understand great photographs you need to close your eyes really should be where this review ends.

Jon Anzalone

Rating: really liked it
Patronizing and solipsistic as a discussion of photography. Barthes spends ample time assigning Latin names to elements of what is, essentially, irony, identifies their interaction as either clever or lame, and then abandons them. Other elements of photography are not considered, and instead he marvels at the possibility that the subject of an old photo may still be alive. He so much as admits he knows not much about photography, and goes on to talk at great length about himself instead.

I've been looking for an intellectual discourse on the nature of photography as an art; things that are found in the moment of the place, or of the artist, or of the viewer, use of aesthetic elements as a means of expressive language, style, approach, impact, intent, unintent, application of technical approach, so on. This book is none of those things and is not recommended under any circumstances in a meaningful study of the art.

Ryan

Rating: really liked it
Along with Susan Sontag's On Photography, Camera Lucida is one of the earliest and still most frequently cited analyses of the medium. This might seem strange considering how personal and 'literary' it is, but, whether for or against, academics continue to use this little book to make all sorts of exaggerated claims about visual culture.

As he acknowledges, Barthes' take on photography is determined by a phenomenological reduction. "...I decided to take myself as a mediator for all Photography. Starting from a few personal impulses, I would try to formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography" (8-9). He splits the photograph into punctum -- a 'point of interest' within the photo that is both responsible for its aesthetic quality and unique for each individual observer -- and studium, or more or less everything else: the signs of the photographer's intention and technical skill, the use of stereotypes, the setting, organization, the style of composition, everything to do with the photograph's 'themes' and culturally determined meanings.

How does one justify leaving out so much? Barthes does it by associating several features of photography with the studium while never associating any of them with each other. So 'taste' in the banal sense, technical knowledge (Barthes doesn't actually know anything about photography), knowledge of the thing photographed, and empathy with the photographic subject are all acknowledged separately, but declined on the same grounds: they don't pertain to photography's 'essence.' They are rather functions, 'myths,' involved merely in "reconciling the photograph with society" (28). So for Barthes the really radical thing is to relegate historical, political, biographical, personal, or whatever content of a given photograph to the realm of dull convention. It is 'unfortunate,' Barthes writes, though apparently necessary, that he finds Koen Wessing's photos of Nicaragua "banal." (23).

I think the problem is that, like photography, Barthes never goes beyond surface impressions. In a sense Barthes' analysis just repeats what he says photography does: "by leading me to believe...that I have found what Calvino calls 'the true total photograph,' it accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality ('that has been') with truth ('there-she-is!'); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being" (113). Recognizing the ease with which photography confuses experiential fact with Truth, Barthes accepts the confusion as necessary, leading to the paradoxical claim that the Real Truth of a photo is more visible the more it is 'liberated' from all explanatory context. Its false impression of immediacy can then be reflexively experienced in idiosyncratic ways by the observer (who, for instance, can go on to write about photography by writing about his mom).

Another good line, again relevant to both photography and Barthes' method of analysis: "photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs" (34).

Alejandro

Rating: really liked it
while to many this book is another of barthes extended fragmentary ramblings on modern media, this is actually a touching novella about a solitary man's recognition of his own humanity upon the death of his mother. he so longs for transcendence, redemption, and eternal life and he prays it might come through the archives and the text. and yet he sadly worries it might not. and that his intellectual musings have somehow missed the point. if you ever wondered what in search of lost time was really about but didn't want to leaf through the 3000 pages (but i recommend you do that) then this a short treatise on what proust was doing in telling his story.

Jonfaith

Rating: really liked it
It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all.
[listening to Philip Jeck's 7 album as I write, appropriate, evocative.]

This treatment of photography appears grounded in a sense of time and thus in a sense of loss. Ephemeral beings contemplating moments which are lost--even if preserved in an image, the distillation of memory obscures and distorts. Barthes weaves a pair of concepts which illustrate how an image can inform us, or be informed by our recognition of its context or how a photograph can affect us, leave a wound, an impression, an unexpected response or feeling. Barthes cites Godard, who said there is no just image, there's just an image. There's much to ponder in a week when transparency becomes a debatable concept. Somehow this idea of photographic mourning becomes an almost atonement. Barthes notes, [t]he photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.

Hani

Rating: really liked it
This is THE PHOTOGRAPHY ! This is THE real art. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
I have found my soul on Photography. Thats it.

David

Rating: really liked it
I spent this afternoon looking through old black & white photos from the fifties taken by my father, of the extended family. My cousins, now dead or old, as they were when young, at birthday, Easter and Christmas parties, and my mother as an attractive young woman with her life before her. Of myself in one group photo, aged 1 year, somewhat annoyed at sliding off my cousin Janet’s 8-year-old knee as I try to read my book, believe it or not!

I’ve often thought this – that when you look into a camera the audience is unimaginable, and you are dead, along with all your friends and family and other loved ones that you take for granted so much, and indeed your whole world. Everything here as I glance out of the window, is already gone.

I read a diary of mine from 1984 a few years back and I’d written at one point, ‘All this, that seems to be happening now, happened many years ago, and I too am dead and gone.’ The first part of the sentence was true, and the second part will be fairly soon. All the more reason to tell people unreservedly how much they mean to you before it’s too late.