Notes on:
Barthes, R. (1993) Camera Lucida.
London: Vintage
Dave Harris
[This is a strange little book in a way, very easy
to read, written in the first person. Roland
spends the first part of the book trying to
explain why some photographs have an effect on him
and others don't. And the course of this, he
introduces the famous concepts studium and
punctum. Neither of these are very
easy to describe, because they seem to be
subjective and unpredictable, especially punctum.
The second part tries to generalize a bit more and
is based on a particular attempt to explain the
appeal of a photograph of his recently dead mother
as a young child. This leads him to
speculate about the authenticity or realism of
photographs, using different terminology,
especially noeme. I first came
across this term when reading phenomenology, when
Husserl uses it to
refer to the qualities of the object that is being
thought of, rather than noesis, which
refers to the qualities of the ideas about
objects. However, some commentaries on
Barthes saying he uses the term just to refer to
the essence or essential quality of the
photograph. As he insists that we must see
an immediate unity between the photograph and the
object, it is possible to reconcile these two
understandings. Anyway, what matters is what
he says the noeme of the photograph is—
the quality of a 'that has been']
[Note that Barthes says he is not a photographer
or operator, which might explain a certain naivety
about how photographs are actually
composed?]. It is clear that he does not
like having his photograph taken, because the
snapshots can never be typical, and he worries
about the uses to which the image might be
put. Photographs only mimic, not very subtly
usually. As a result, 'the portrait -
photograph is a closed field of forces. Four
image - repertoires intersect here, oppose and
distort each other. In front of the lens, I
am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one
I want others to think I am, the one the
photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use
of to exhibit his art' (13). He already
notes that photographs have some connection with
the idea of death. He has simple likes and
dislikes, but he wants to explore these,
especially the way in which some photographs leave
him indifferent and say nothing, while the others
appear to be animated, conveying a sense of
adventure. He did not want to explore
aesthetics or a formal ontology, since he wanted
to preserve the notion of subjective impact, 'a
wound' (21).
Some photographs makes sense because he can bring
his knowledge and culture to bear when he reads
it. This is studium—'application to
have thing, taste for someone, a kind of general,
enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without
special acuity' (26). Such knowledge helps
people participate to some extent in the action in
the photograph. By contrast, punctum
is something which comes out of the scene, and
'peirces me'. It disturbs the studium.
It is a 'sting, speck, little hole—and also cast
of the dice [an] accident which 'is poignant to
me'(27). It is different from a general
polite interest or liking.
Studium involves looking at the
photographer's intention, as a kind of 'knowledge
and civility', recognizing the social or mythical
intentions: 'to inform, to represent, to surprise,
to cause, to signify, to provoke desire'
(28). This explains the use of photographs
in ethnography, drawing on the 'infra knowledge'
of the spectator. It flatters the spectator
because it delivers knowledge. [And pictures
of people are seen as particularly likely to do
this]. This can be socially dangerous, and
has led to censorship, producing too much
reflection—such is the 'pensive' photograph (38).
The punctum offers us something different.
The 'unary photograph' (40), is one which
generates a transformative series, transforming
reality, but without any duality or
disturbance. It is banal, it has a unified
composition, according to photographic
conventions. Pornographic photographs, not
erotic ones, are also homogeneous, naive,
presenting only one thing. However, in this
unified composition, a detail can act as a
punctum, a chance inclusion, not composed,
not capable of analysis. It is often a
detail or 'partial object' (43) [the Freudian
reference is intended?]. Examples given are
the belts worn by a particular person in a
photograph, or their shoes. A punctum
'arouses great sympathy and me, almost a kind of
tenderness', regardless of taste or
morality. The punctum has 'a power
of expansion'(45) often through metonymy, allowing
for the forms of recognition ['Proustian'says our
man].
The detail does not provoke if the photographer
includes it deliberately, say as some rhetorical
contrast. It must be rather 'a
supplement that is at once inevitable and
delightful' (47). It simply shows that the
photographer was there [much more important later]
and could not do other than record the
punctum. Detail can also produce 'a satori,
the passage of a void' (49) [apparently, satori is
a sudden flash of enlightenment, where one can
perceive an essence]. There is 'an intense
immobility' in the photograph.
It is hard to explain exactly what it is about
detail that produces a punctum. The
effect is often revealed when reflecting upon a
photograph, afterwards: 'I may know better a
photograph I remember than a photograph I am
looking at', since the act of looking is connected
to simple description and 'in order to see a
photograph well, it is best to look away or close
your eyes'(53). This helps us avoid any
obvious messages. This addition of meaning
is not possible in the movies because 'I am not
free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them
again, I would not discover the same image'.
This is why the cinema does not induce
pensiveness.
Nevertheless, contemplating the cinema, we realize
that people being films continue to live
outside. Photographs by contrast seen
motionless, pinning down the figures. Yet
the punctum opens things up again, raises
questions [one question is who is the Scotsman in
a picture of Queen Victoria—it is John Brown, you
clot!]. This is 'the blind field' (57), the
field alluded to by thinking of life outside the
photograph. This is one difference between
the pornographic and the erotic—the latter 'takes
the spectator outside its frame' (59) into 'a kind
of subtle beyond', a whole being.
Then we move on to Part Two, going beyond
subjective pleasure, to unleash a 'palinode'[a
retraction of a statement, a poem recanting an
earlier one] [his subsequent meditation on looking
through photographs of his recently dead mother
makes him realize that his mother is in history,
an existence before he was alive, a history that
excluded him.]. Looking through the
photographs brought about the painful effort to
try to define his mother's essential identity,
reconstituting it from parts and fragments.
[This seems to be some anxiety that he's not
possible to recall her that easily—very common
when thinking of the dead, of course]. One
photograph is particularly meaningful—his mother
at the age of five years old. The image
contains familiar signs of the later face and
body, and displays an innocent expression,
asserting gentleness and kindness. These
seem to be excessive, not produced by her own
family relations. It was particularly
suitable to assist the processes of grief, just
and accurate. He experienced Proustian
remembrance, and realized that this is something
more than just a technical photograph, somehow
uniting 'both my mother's being and my grief at
her death' (70). This particular photograph
seemed to display the essence of his mother.
The trawl through the photographs to get back to
this particularly early one corresponds to his
experiences in reality, thinking of his mother's
last stages when she was very weak, and when she
regressed to being a child, something that he
could understand: 'ultimately I experienced her,
strong as she had been, my inner law, as my
feminine child. Which was my way of
resolving Death' (72). He gained a new
particularity himself [partly because he had no
children], and he was able to experience this
vicarious universalization. He realized that
this would never happen again and that his own
mundanely individual death awaited.
Is it possible to generalize about photography on
the basis of this experience? He realized
that photography could be understood 'in relation
to what we romantically call love and death' (73)
[and it was to relate to singularity too, so that
using social conventions to understand photographs
simply would 'reduce myself - as - subject'
(74)]. Theoretical approaches like Freud
also reduce singularities—the 'family to the
Family… My mother to the Mother'.. He
could see that his mother did partake of all the
standard functions and qualities of mothers, but
'she had added that grace of being an individual
soul' (75). Even though time has moderated
his emotion of loss, everything else remains,
because he has lost not a figure 'but a
being… a quality (a soul)… The
irreplaceable'.
The implication is 'that every photograph is
somehow co-natural with its referent… The
truth of the image' (76). The banal is
combined with the singular. The particular
referent of photography is not like the optional
real thing to which a sign refers, but 'the
necessarily real thing which has been placed
before the lens, without which there would be no
photograph'. Paintings can paint things that
are not real, discourses can link together signs
that may not have referents, but photography makes
it impossible to 'deny that the thing has been
there' [a bit naive here, especially with modern
electronic photographs, of course]. The
reality and the past are superimposed. This
is the noeme of photography ['the very
essence', 76]. Photographs should not be
understood as either art or communication, but as
reference. The noeme is '"That - has
- been", or again: the Intractable' (77),
something linking infinity and the subject,
'irrefutably present, and yet already
deferred'[other bits of Latin, which he sees as 'a
pedantry necessary because it illuminates certain
nuances', include interfuit and intersum].
Sometimes we experience these noeme with
indifference, but some photographs provide 'a
unique emotion' making one aware of the nature of
photography: to 'compel me to believe its referent
had really existed'.
The photograph makes us think of an instant in
which a real thing happened and is depicted
immobile. This is lost in cinema. In
photography, something that appears is there for
ever rather than something passing before the
lens. Photographs never offer
metaphors. Everything appears alive, even
photographs of corpses which are 'the living image
of a dead thing'. The notion of 'the Real
and the Live' are confused (79): the referent is
taken to be real, but the moment of taking the
photograph is passed, which 'suggests that it is
already dead'. However, the photograph
testifies that someone has actually seen the
referent in life. A photograph of the face
of a slave indicates these qualities—the man has
been a slave, and can certify that slavery
existed, he can offer an 'experiential order of
proof', something direct not merely inferred, or
mediated by history—'the fact was established
without method' (80).
Of course painterly conventions have affected
photography, but so has chemistry. The noeme
depends on 'the discovery that silver halogens
were sensitive to light'. The luminous rays
emitted from a body are literally recorded: 'The
photograph is literally an emanation of the
referent'. The actual 'carnal medium' (81)
of light connects the photographed body to the
spectator's gaze. Images are revealed by
light and recorded on precious metals. The
photographing 'has really touched the surface
which in its turn my gaze will touch'—the
photograph of his mother as a child is 'the
treasury of rays which emanated from my
mother… on that day' (82). We do not
need to rely on memory or imagination, as we do
with art: we can experience 'reality in the past
state: at once the past and the real' (82).
This assists meditation on life and death, and
makes one ask 'why is it that I am alive here and
now?'. In this sense, photography raises
'questions which derive from a "stupid" or simple
metaphysics' (85).
In another example, we might see a photograph of
ourselves even though we cannot remember it having
been taken -- again an inevitable and undeniable
reality. Language cannot provide a sense of
authenticity like this. It is 'by nature
fictional' (87), and if we want to make it under
fictional, we need all sorts of special efforts
including logic and sworn oaths. Photography
by contrast 'does not invent; it is authentication
itself'. There are some artifices involved,
and it is possible to fake pictures, but this is
laborious. Photography can lie about the
meanings of a thing, but 'never as to its
existence'. In this way 'its force is
nonetheless superior to everything the human mind
can or can have conceded to assure us of
reality—but also this reality is never anything
but a contingency'. It demythologises the
past, and in this sense, the invention of the
photograph 'divides the history of the world'
(88).
There is a great deal of scorn these days about
realism, since the photograph is always coded,
says sociologists and semiologists [and Barthes
was to change his mind about this, of
course]. It is true that there is always
'Albertian perspective', and conventional ways of
turning three dimensional objects into a two
dimensional plane. Of course the photograph
is analogical in this sense, but 'This argument is
futile', because the noeme has nothing to
do with analogy, it is 'an image without code',
even though codes are required to read it.
The important thing about it is its possession of
'an evidential force' and its ability to testify
about the operation of time. Overall, at
least 'from a phenomenological viewpoint', 'the
power of authentication exceeds the power of
representation' (89). [Later, page 99, we
are told that it's the amateur who gets closer to
the noeme of photography]
The photographic image is already 'full', while in
the cinema the reference is shifting, depicting a
flow of experience. The photograph breaks
this flow, and is 'without future' (90). The
reality it depicts cannot be transformed. It
is 'without culture'. It can not be
transformed by a ritual. It depicts
immobilized time, 'the stasis of an arrest' (91).
It is an alternative to memory. It blocks
memory. In this sense it is
'violent... Because on each occasion it
fills the sight by force, and because in it
nothing can be refused or transformed'.
Photographs can decay and be thrown away, however.
Photography therefore can be seen as an agent of
Death, and it has emerged with changing notions of
death as something nonsymbolic, out of religion,
'flat Death' (92). Eventually 'the
astonishment of "that-has-been" will also
disappear' (94). Moments of the past in
photographs will disappear once the reader of the
photograph dies.
Overall, there is not only studium and punctum,
but another kind of punctum, not just a
matter of the eternal form 'but of intensity', the
impact of time, 'the lacerating emphasis of the noeme,
its pure representation'. The example is the
photograph of the condemned assassin [also
discussed in Rancière].
It is possible to see a future in which this
assassin will be dead. All photographs of
people involve the shock that they will die or
that they have already died. We see people
who have their whole lives in front of them but
who are also dead from the perspective of
today. This produces a 'vertigo of time
defeated'(97), and layers of time, all three
tenses mixed together, and all depicted 'under the
instants of "reality"—and no longer through the
elaborations of the text'.
This is what makes photographs of people
challenging. It leads towards a necessary
solitariness in being a spectator.
Photography emerged at the same time as the
'explosion of the private into the public'(98),
but the private is also the only place 'where my
image is free… The condition of an
interiority which I believe is identified with my
truth'.
In private, one tries to change the meaning of a
photograph, examining detail, enlarging or
decomposing the image, scrutinizing it, trying to
enter into its depth. But nothing is
discovered, although sometimes we think we get
closer and perceive truth. When we notice
resemblance for example, we think of conformity of
the image to an identity, but the identity itself
is imprecise or even imaginary, false. When
we look at our own photographs, we can only
compare one with the other, and none of them look
like us. Photographs that resemble people
often are the least satisfying, and in his case,
it was 'the lost, or remote photograph, one which
does not look "like" her, the photograph of the
child I never knew' (103) which provokes the
understanding. [Incidentally, we are told
that it is wrong to think the camera obscura
should be associated with photography—it is rather
camera lucida, 'that apparatus, anterior to
Photography, which permitted drawing an object
through a prism, one eye on the model, the other
on the paper' (106).]
It is the certainty of the image, unlike that of a
text, which permits observations with intensity,
but the paradox is that the very certainty of the
photograph serves to stop interpretation, asking
us only to express 'fundamental belief' in its
reality (107). That photograph allowed him to
discover his mother, outside of mere likeness, in
a way where words fail [satori again].
Photographs of faces also feature an 'air (the
expression, the look)'. This cannot be
analysed without moving away from the photograph
itself. It is not an intellectual
construction nor an analogy. Rather it is
something that 'induces from body to soul' (109),
a 'sudden awakening', 'a kind of intractable
supplement of identity', appearing as something
unimportant for the subjects. The early
photograph reveals his mother beneath all those
masks, a soul. 'Perhaps the air is
ultimately something moral, mysteriously
contributing to the faith of reflection of a life
value?'(110). The air is 'the luminous
shadow which accompanies the body'.
Photographs often miss this air, and this is
painful in photographs of loved ones, leaving only
an effigy. The preservation of an air in
this particular photograph was just a matter of
luck.
Photographic looks are paradoxical. The
subject often seems to look directly at the
spectator, but without seeing them. We
become aware that they have thoughts without
targets, but this is what produces the air, a
sense of intelligence 'without thinking about
anything intelligent, just by looking into this
piece of black plastic' (113), demonstrating
pensiveness. The problem is that it also
conveys madness—'whoever looks you straight in the
eye is mad'. Yet this is still an example of
where 'affect... is a guarantee of
Being'. This suggests the possibility of the
true total photograph, 'the unheard of
identification of reality ("that-has-been") with
truth (" there-she-is!")'
Photography has this special noeme,
producing certainty that objects have
existed. Photographs become 'a new form of
hallucination: false on the level of perception,
true on the level of time' (115) because we know
that something is not there [now] , but it has
been. Hallucination describes well the
intensity that one can feel when looking at
photographs which produce emotional
intensity. There is a link between
photography, madness and 'the pangs of love'
(116). We can also experience vicarious ['mad']
pity, for what is dead and what is going to die.
Photographs are domesticated by 'society', because
of this threatening madness. First,
photography can be made into an art, but only by
abandoning its noeme and the shock that
can be produced. The photographic image
becomes 'simply an illusion' (117).
Secondly, photography can be generalized and
banalized, until it lacks anything special or
scandalous, often for example when photographs
appear all over the world and are drawn from 'the
generalized image - repertoire'(118) [a hint of
the notion of the spectacle]. Here
photography claims to illustrate the world, but
actually de-realizes it. The images get
consumed and they can be less authentic, we deal
with them with 'nauseated boredom' and in
difference.
So photography can be mad or tame. The
latter if its realism is 'tempered by aesthetic or
empirical habits' (119), mad if its 'realism is
absolute and, so to speak, original', forcing us
to contemplate the moment of time, in
'photographic ecstasy'. We can choose either
route.
[Generally, definite shades of the Bourdieuvian
'high aesthetic' here, emotional engagement
but at the highest level of 'love' and philosophy,
disdain for anything deliberate or contrived. It
is all ineffable -- but people of good taste will
know what he means because they share the same
habitus?]
more social theory
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