Camera Lucida – Roland Barthes (σκοτεινός θάλαμος)
Part I.
What is Photography?
Part I.
What is Photography?
- photography vs. cinema
- ontological investigation
- Classification (p.4)
- professional vs. amateur (empirical)
- landscape / objects / portraits / nudes (rhetorical)
- realism vs. pictorialism (aesthetic)
- “This”
- “A specific photographer is never distinguished from its referent.” (p.5)
- signifier/signified
- Language of the Expressive vs. Critical
• “ . . . a desperate resistance to any reductive system.” (p.8)
The Photograph: to do / to undergo / to look
- operator vs. spectator
- simulacrum
- chemical / optical / emotion?
Ownership of the Photograph
- subject becoming an object
- death as subject
Spectator
- I like / I don’t like (p.18)
- attached to a specific photograph, rather than a body of work
- connected to “sentimental” reasons (phenomenal approach)
- Studium
• application to a thing / general enthusiasm without special acuity (p.26)
Punctum
• “ . . . is that accident which pricks me” (punctuates; jumps out from the
scene)
Representation of the Dead
• Tableau Vivant (a representation of a scene by a group in appropriate
costume posing silent and motionless)
Surprises (depicts)
- rare
- depicts something the normal eye cannot apprehend
- prowess Q??
- “contortions of technique”
- “trouvalle” or “lucky friend”
- “ . . . the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken (p.34)
Operative
- “A photograph cannot signify (aim at generality) except by assuming a
mask.” (p.34) - “Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or
even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” (p.38)
Unary (used to describe a mathematical operation that is applied to only one member of a set at a time, for example, squaring a number)
• “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” – Kafka