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About ArchiveDespite a spate of writings on photography in recent years—Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” Janet Malcolm’s “Diana & Nikon,” Max Kozloff’s “Photography & Fascination,” parts of John Berger’s “About Looking”—the posthumous publication of Roland Barthes’s thoughts on the medium raises unusually high expectations. For Barthes, one of the high priests of contemporary intellectual opinion, to consider photography, an arriviste in the arena of high culture, would seem certain to secure its importance. More important, Barthes’s relatively brief considerations of photography in “Mythologies” and “Image-Music-Text” held out the promise that a full-scale analysis would create new ways of thinking and talking about photographs.
“Camera Lucida” is not, however, the definitive reappraisal of photography that was anticipated. It does not reveal the long-sought “grammar” of photographs, nor does it provide much in the way of clues to their “reading.” It is more intimate than theoretical. Barthes bites into photography like Proust into a madeleine and what results is an intricate, quirky and ultimately frustrating meditation linking photography to death.
Like “The Pleasure of the Text” (1975), in which Barthes speaks to a sense of erotic play in literature, “Camera Lucida” forsakes the analytic methods on which the author built his reputation in favor of a more personal discourse. Barthes contends that a photograph, because it is “never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents),” resists semiotic analysis, which presupposes a division between an image and its referent. But one suspects a more personal motive behind his impulse to abandon semiotics. Barthes writes of his “uneasiness” at being “torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical,” of his “ultimate dissatisfaction” with the critical discourses of “sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis,” and of his “desperate resistance to any reductive system.” Seen in relation to “The Pleasure of the Text,” his reflections on photography merely confirm his growing disaffection with semiotics and his decision to use his own emotions as a prime source of insight.
Barthes’s attempt to shift from a critical discourse Andy Grundberg reviews photography for The New York Times. to a more intimate mode is not fully accomplished, though, and much of “Camera Lucida” reads like a battle between the two languages. Following his “old” manners, he categorizes the effects that photographs can have upon viewers. His primary insight is to divide the source of a photograph’s affect into two categories, which he labels studium and punctum. The studium of a photograph, according to Barthes, is its culturally determined context; the studium is the source of the viewer’s usually mild, “polite interest” in a photograph, “the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments, the books, the clothes” that one finds “all right.” The punctum breaks through this complacency of response, provoking a more intense and personal reaction in the viewer; it is usually that detail, “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”
Citing a 1926 James Van der Zee portrait of a black family dressed in their Sunday best, he locates the studium in its general context of “respectability, family life, conformism … an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man’s attributes.” The punctum, for Barthes, arises from the details of the younger woman’s low slung belt and strapped pumps: “Mary Janes—why does this dated fashion touch me?” he asks. While the mystery of the Mary Janes remains unsolved, the point is clear: the punctum is that part of the photograph that cannot be casually, disinterestedly observed. In the case of the Van der Zee photograph, the punctum gave “the black woman in her Sunday best … a whole life external to her portrait.”
The ultimate effect of punctum is the intimation of death. This Barthes realizes in the personal context of his bereavement over the still recent death of his mother; looking at a portrait of her as a young girl (a picture he declines to reproduce in “Camera Lucida”), he sees that her death implies his own. From this he arrives at the broad conclusion that every photograph contains the sign of his death, and that the essence of photography is the implied message: “That has been.” It is no coincidence that Barthes is given to quoting Proust; Proust’s obsession with memory is Barthes’s obsession with death. Proust’s immense powers of recall embody all that Barthes hopes to extract from a photograph but which, intractably, the photograph refuses to yield.
Compared to Susan Sontag’s linkage of photography to the esthetic of Surrealism, or even John Berger’s often programmatic Marxist discoveries, Barthes’s contribution to photographic theory seems meager. The studium and the punctum, tied as they are to the subjective reactions of individual viewers, are not supple tools for analytic reasoning; rather, they are the last links in a chain of reductive thinking. If the essence of the photograph is found in death, it leads only to a dead end. Part of the problem is that Barthes’s view of photographic practice is limited; his preference is for portraiture, there more clearly to find death lurking behind the photograph’s visage. Primarily, though, Barthes’s conclusions clear no space for argumentation or elaboration. (Walter Benjamin’s notion of “the tiny spark of accident” in photographs, found in his 1931 essay, “A Short History of Photogra-phy,” may be Barthes’s source for the punctum; however, Barthes does not follow up on Benjamin’s linkage of the camera to an “optical unconscious.”)
“Camera Lucida” is not without provocative and debatable propositions, however. Barthes’s initial assumption, that the photograph inevitably carries with it a trace of its subject, is so unfashionable as to be enchanting. How can photography be a modernist art if it cannot shed the burden of its referent? Such a reactionary notion (also shared by Benjamin) puts more emphasis on subject matter than most contemporary photography critics have been willing to allow. Similarly, Barthes’s sense of devil’s advocacy leads him to dismiss the photography-was-invented-by-painting theory (most recently advanced by Peter Galassi of the Museum of Modern Art) in a single sentence. No, says Barthes, the essential fact is that it was invented by chemists.
But just as “Camera Lucida” is sure to confound its photographic audience, it will dismay the proponents of semiotics. Besides repeating his earlier position that the photograph has no code, in effect making it unavailable to semiotic inquiry, Barthes summarily rejects the prevailing semiotic view of the medium:
“It is the fashion, nowadays, among Photography’s commentators (sociologists and semiologists), to seize upon a semantic relativity: no ‘reality’ (great scorn for the ‘realists’ who do not see that the photograph is always coded), nothing but artifice. … The realists, of whom I am one … do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art.” For followers of Barthes’s thought the message is clear: Increasingly, Barthes sensed a disparity between the way semiotics described the world and the way he perceived it as lived.
“Camera Lucida” is at its most compelling when the text (Barthes’s analysis of photography, and the ways it can be thought about) gives way to a subtext that concerns his growing apprehension of death. Surely the death of his mother, with whom he had lived, marked a drastic change in his life, and “Camera Lucida” is, in a sad and almost tragic way, a record of his attempts to come to terms with grief. His fascination with the portrait of his mother, leading to the discovery that the ultimate punctum is death, is the fascination of a man who is seeking, like Proust, to recover a life that has vanished. But while Barthes does not allow his subtext to consume his text, he cannot suppress it, either. This leads to a curious self-consciousness, as when he anticipates his reviews: “The noeme (essence) of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: ‘that has been.’ I know our critics: What! A whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance?” Barthes’s reply to these straw critics is singularly unconvincing; he tries to make the medium out to be a revolutionary one, uncultured and untamed. A look at photographic history suggests that it is neither.
By the book’s end, then, the author seems totally, achingly alone. He is alone among photographic thinkers, alone among semiotic analysts, alone with the memory of his mother. It is no wonder that he sees only death in photographs. Ironically, shortly after completing “Camera Lucida,” he was run over and killed on a Paris street, abruptly meeting the death he foresaw. Barthes also saw desire, grief and pity in photographs, however; one reads “Camera Lucida” and encounters the same feelings.