Camera Lucida - Roland Barthes

Camera Lucida is a subjective, personal and sentimental essay about photography (and mourning, perhaps even death). That he started writing after his mother died. It was the last book he wrote as he passed away a month after the book was published. It is considered one of the most influential books on photography. Strangely enough his analysis is very subjective and sometimes even states the obvious. As Barthes adresses to his future critics in the last chapter: “What! A whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance?” (p. 115).

In the first part, Barthes describes that he was “overcome by an ontological desire”. He wanted to learn what photography is “in itself” and by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images. He did this through “making himself the measure of photographic knowledge”. (Barthes, 1980). He especially wanted to know why certain photographs attracted him so powerfully, and what exactly there is in a photo that sets him off. He therefore, in the first part of the book, distinguishes two themes in Photography that co-exist next to eachother: the studium and the punctum.

The general interest he has in certain photographs, he describes as studium. The word coming from Latin, means something like; a taste of something, or a kind of general enthusiastic commitment. The studium is about liking or not liking. Ones cultural backgrond or knowledge dictates what you like and what you don’t, so you could say the image is coded, and it depends on the Specter how it is decoded. It is the meaning and the context of the photograph that you can find by looking. I could for example have a general interest in history or how people look and dress in certain countries. Barthes gives as one example a picture by William Klein in which he says: “When William Klein photographs “Mayday, 1959” in Moscow, he teaches me how the Russians dress (which after all I don’t know): I note a boy’s big cloth cap, another’s necktie, an old woman’s scarf around her head a youth’s haircut. This general interest in how Russians dress, is the studium of that photograph.

The punctum on the other hand is something that shoots out like an arrow, it ‘pricks’ him, it is that thing that stands out, a detail. This detail animates to the Specter (the viewer) and takes him outside of the frame. It is a kind of subtle beyond. Barthes gives as an example the family portrait taken by Van der Zee, the detail that stands out for him is “the strapped pumps of the black woman in her Sunday best;”. Sometimes the punctum reveals itself after looking at a photograph because a page later he changes his mind: “But this photograph has worked within me, and later on I realized that the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing:” (p.53). The necklace fascinated him because he had seen this necklace being worn by one of his family members. So in short, the punctum could be a detail but also “the punctum could accommodate a certain latency”(p. 53).

In the second part of the book, mourning his mother, he was looking through photographs of her to find the one that contained her ‘air’. Eventually he found this in the Winter Garden Photo. Which shows his mother at the age of five. We don’t get to see it because,“[...]for you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.) (p73). But to him this photograph contained something like an essence of the photograph. Which he than again takes as a new guide for the investigation to find the essence of all Photographs.

In the second part of the book he finds a new punctum, namely Time: “The name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: “that-has-been”.

That-has-been is death (not always in a literal sense) shown in a photograph, which is the noeme of photography. As Barthes puts it poetically: “As the light once reflected from the object onto the film, when viewing a photograph the rays of light reflect back to us. As a thing that has been.” This seems obvious though. But to Barthes this is what creates the shock that is the punctum. To illustrate this he looks at a photograph of Lewis Payne in his cell waiting to be hanged, taken by Alexander Gardner. Barthes describes the punctum here like this: “But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.” (p.96).

This photograph doesn’t only deal with ‘that-has-been’ but also with ‘that-will-be’. The Specter now experiences the distance between the moment in the past and the moment of observation. He got the same experience by looking at his mothers photograph. He knew the picture was a reflection of the past, but also that his mother was going to die.