Along with Susan Sontag's
On Photography, Roland Barthes text
Camera Lucida is considered one of the most prominent early theoretical writings on Photography. Reflecting on the unique nature and ethos of photography itself, Barthes presents his myriad of ideas in two parts. The first digs into the true spirit of the Photograph, while the second is a much more personal journey to find a true representation of his late mother. The two sections differ in their tone and focus, but both are dependent on each other, both exploring themes of duality of self and time brought on through the advent of photography.
Themes of time, memory, and death flow throughout his analysis of Photography. At one point Barthes writes, "For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches-- and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood." (p. 15) His constant obsession with Photography's ability to freeze and capture time spills over into Barthes use an anthropological and phenomenological theoretical lens. According to Barthes, what sets Photography apart from painting or cinema is the ability to authenticate the existence of a scene. He writes "in the Photograph the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation." (p. 89) Although the advances in technology and ubiquity of Photoshop have had some impact on this statement, it still holds that photography is the only medium with this credibility. It seems, however, that this authenticity is applied to inanimate or impersonal objects. For when Barthes is searching for an accurate portrayal of his mother, he searches through hundreds of photographs, finally settling on an old photograph of her as a child. He writes, "what [the photographer] was making permanent was the truth-- the truth for me." (p. 110) Admitting the duality of the self in private, and the self being photographed, Barthes is aware of the difficulties in capturing minute expressions of personalities. Although he praises professional photographers such as Avedon and Mapplethorpe for their abilities to capture these details, he also acknowledges the luck of amateur photographers. He writes "Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot-- or will not-- achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the noeme of Photography."
Among the many musing presented in this text, in the primary portion Barthes focuses on "a co-presence of two discontinuous elements" within a photograph. He calls these the studium and the punctum. Barthes writes, "It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions." (p. 26) This cultural interaction with images is what makes them interesting to us as the viewer. But according to Barthes, he wants photographs to animate him, to create a sence of excitement and adventure (p. 20). This break from just studium, the prick or punctuation that carries a photograph over into the exceptional is what Barthes refers to as punctum. Although Barthes begins his writing in a search for a universal truth about photography, it seems to me that his emphasis on punctum is rather subjective. Besides this incongruency in his objective and result (something he seems to admit towards the end p. 115), I enjoy this idea of the studium and punctum. I have always found that I am drawn to certain photographs because of minute details that entertain my imagination. Explaining why these moments capture my attention is difficult. Perhaps this difficulty comes from a personal connection to the detail that escapes even my own conscious thought, or because my attraction to it is something so simple, such as color, shape, irony, or mere presence. Barthes states, "the incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance." (p. 51) Although I admire photographs for aesthetic or formal properties, my favorite images have always been those that "disturb." Not necessarily in a bad sense, but something that shakes you from the everyday reality, something that forces you outside of your usual frame of thought. "Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks." (p. 38)
In my own reading and analysis of this text, I found it similar to Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others in it's incapability to flow, connect, and stay on topic. On the back of my edition there's a comment from Newsweek's Douglad Davis, "This is a great book-- flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving." I completely agree with this analysis. Each page has fifty varying thoughts and none all at the same time. Always a sucker for quotes, there were a lot of hidden gems within some of the nonsense. Most are vaguely connected to his main themes but stand independently, begging further questioning and thought. I'm going to end my response by listing some that stuck out to me below.
"Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see." (p. 6)
"For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity." (p. 12)
"The 'private life' is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect." (p. 15)
"The Photograph whose meaning... is too impressive is quickly deflected; we consume it aesthetically, not politically." (p. 36) **Interesting that this quote should fit so perfect with my project for Beyond the Single Image
"I am a primitive, a child-- or a manic; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own." (p. 51)
"History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it-- and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it." (p. 65)
"... when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it. What characterizes the so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs; they are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more 'false' (less 'authentic')...." (p. 119)
