Barthes, Roland Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang 1981)
Camera Lucida is Roland Barthes final book before his death in 1980. In it, he explores the medium of photography and attempts to analyze and define its essence or “noeme”.
Barthes first describes the difficulty in finding the uniqueness of photography as a signifier because it is so difficult to distinguish the photograph from its subject. Other than the paper surface, we tend to overlook the photograph and speak directly of its referent. In order to see the photographic signifier photographers have to use shallow depth of field or extreme wide angle in order to more easily distinguish the photo as being separate from the subject. These techniques allow us to experience the subject photographically. However Barthes isn’t interested so much in seeing the photographic signifier as he is in losing himself in the referent. He states that a photograph is co-natural because the subject has to have existed. Photography’s power of authentication exceeds its power of representation. Language is fictional and rhetorical by nature, whereas he proposes that photography is analogical to the subject itself.
While Camera Lucida describes photography in terms of a system of practices (consisting of operator, target, and spectator), and the consumption of imagery in terms of Studium (general cultural interest and classifications) and Punctum (details that connect to our personal experiences), and acknowledges the codes that may exists within a photograph, Barthes seeks to go beyond semantics and to trace his interest to the ineffable emotional attraction he experiences with certain photographs. Photography, he says, is more closely related to theatre whose roots are the portrayal of death, than it is to painting.
In Barthe’s case he is seeking to locate a photograph of his deceased mother that captures her essence. He is not looking for a photograph that interprets his mother’s identity, but rather he is looking for the photograph that contains her spirit. It is very difficult to find a photograph that captures a person at their “zero point” where all there emotions are contained within. A photograph tends to exaggerate or over emphasize facets of personality because it is fixed within the single exposure. However, a photograph is unmatched in its ability to convey the subject “naturally”. Unlike any other medium, the photograph offers irrefutable evidence that the subject existed in front of the lens. Ultimately it is a photograph of his mother as a small child that he feels best illustrates the woman he knew. It is the innocence of the child who is willing to lend itself to the photograph without attempting to portray a particular self-image that allows for Barthes to experience the mother he remembered.
Unlike other art forms, Barthes argues that photography cannot transcend the event it depicts, and therefore is very limited as a form of language or social critique. A pipe depicted in a photograph will always remain a pipe; therefore what you can say about the pipe linguistically is very limited. Photography is anchored by time, as it is a “clock that sees”. Every photograph represents a subject-space-time event that has already occurred, which limits our discussion to that of historic reference. In looking at memory, Barthes proposes that a photograph is almost the antithesis of memory because of its complete documentation of history within the image. We can only think about what is there in the photograph because it is the undeniable truth of what has existed.
Seemingly full of contradictions, Camera Lucida gives examples where a photograph’s limitations in language are also sources for power within culture. Richard Avedon’s portrait of William Casby is incontrovertible evidence that slavery existed which is a reality that is difficult for Americans to face. A photograph is a testimony to what the photographer has served witness to. Part of the madness of a photograph is that it compels us to face the truth our own mortality. Barthe describes a photograph as a catastrophe that contains two deaths. The first is the death that occurs at the moment the shutter is triggered and the living subject is converted optically and chemically into an object. Our private selves are transformed into a public spectacle. The second death is in the recognition that the person photograph has died or will die in the future. Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Lewis Payne is a powerful example of this. Lewis Payne is frozen in time within the frame of a photograph. He is a specter that cannot emerge from the frame. His face is motionless and we are confronted with the knowledge that he was once alive, and a short time later was hanged. As if to add to this experience of death, the photographic print itself is organic and subject to deterioration and ultimately a death of its own. The noeme of photography, it turns out, is time and death.
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