PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY #7: Roland Barthes

The French semiologist has a wide area of expertise (See this tag for his other theories and how I have applied them)

From a beginner's guide to photography by The Telegraph 

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes (1980), digested by Tim Clark

Camera Lucida is a short, personal response to photography, so it's strange that it has achieved canonical status, but the magnetism it exerts extends to artists and writers alike. This book is a reflection on longing and loss written after Barthes' mother died. It's curious and affecting, exploring the relationship between photography, history and death.Barthes explains two key concepts that can be applied when looking at photographs. The first he calls the studium – vague details which constitute the photograph’s subject, meaning and context.However it's the second concept, the punctum, that has really resonated. By this he means the aspect of an image that attracts the viewer, something intensely private, unexpected and thus indelible. “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” he wrote. The discussion centres on a photograph from 1898, an image of his mother when she was a child, never at any point shown in the book. “For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’”.So subjective, and at times sentimental, is his examination of photography that initial responses to the book were scathing. Conversely, perhaps it is this very act of personalisation and the sense of vulnerability that has continued to capture imaginations in the 30 years since publication. Indeed, the academic Geoffrey Batchen, in his book Photography Degree Zero ventures that Camera Lucida is perhaps the most popular and influential contribution to photography to this day.    

In his own words

“Photography: it reminds us of its mythic heritage only by that faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look at ‘myself’ on a piece of paper.”

“Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatises, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

“Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”  

How to sound as if you've read it 

 All photography tells us death in the future.