Reading—Barthe’s Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes’ short book on the nature of photography seems, at times, less about photography than it is an extended personal reflection on grief and the persistence of memory. The death of his mother prompts him to look at photographs of her and of his family, to see what he can recover that reminds him of her essence. At the end of the book, the answer appears to be: relatively little. Along the way, however, the reader is treated to a discussion of photography’s unique genius, a kind of extrapolation from his experience of his family’s photographs to statements about the medium as a whole (73).

Part of photography’s uniqueness lies in the way that it “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (4) and that, unlike painting, it forever carries its referent with it (5–7). A painting can portray a scene that has never existed, but a photograph (for the most part?) points to something that once appeared in front of a camera. Describing the pre-digital world, Barthes separates the phenomenon into a chain of Operator (photographer), Spectrum (the image or spectacle itself) and Spectator (the viewer; 9). As a non-photographer, however, Barthes concerns himself only with the last two of these (10).

[Question: What would Barthes have made of digital image generation and manipulation?]

The photographic subject is always aware that he or she is posing, which introduces a series of distancing states of mind and behaviour: “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). The act of taking a simple portrait is clearly not so simple—and Barthes hasn’t even introduced the place of the viewer in interpreting the portrait once it has been made.

[Observation: the various layers of thinking between photographer and subject could serve as a useful set of interpretive questions.]

Barthes introduces his thoughts about the relationship between photography and death early in the book and returns to it at several points. Cameras are “clocks for seeing” (a lovely phrase!) that have the power to freeze an instant and render the subject locked in time, dead (14–15). Photography is related to theatre, with early connections with “the cult of the Dead” (31).

The author speaks about the importance of affect in photography, which the Spectator experiences “as a wound,” (20–21). This will help to set up the later discussion on the presence of the punctum in some photographs—probably the central contribution of the book to the understanding of photographs.

[Question: why is Barthes interested in some photographs but not in others? Is it an issue of affect rather than interest? (25)]

Barthes introduces his categories of studium and punctum. The “studium is of the order of liking, not of loving” and leads us “inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions” (26–27). It “is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, “politeness”) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices…” (28).

[Observation: from his description of studium in this passage and others, I get the distinct impression that Barthes is not much interested in photographers or what motivates them. I believe his word for much of the process and practice photographic would be “banal.” He is not a photographer himself and, while he seems to have a romantic attachment to the sounds of shutters and the appearance of wooden cameras (15), he is largely preoccupied with his own experiences as a Spectator. It is likely for this reason he spends so much time on punctum: it directly touches his own feelings.]

The punctum is a “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27).

[Observation: I did not fully appreciate how idiosyncratic and personal Barthes’ idea of punctum was until much later in the book. I had thought, at first, that every good (?) picture would have both studium and punctum until I saw how Barthes used punctum: the reactions and associations he has with odd elements in an image, filtered through his feelings and experiences. There is likely no universal punctum we can appeal to or look for in an image—it is all about the Spectator’s response. I have to admit being a bit disappointed in this, but I suppose that it is largely accurate: we respond to particular images because they call up something in us, consciously or unconsciously. It reminds me of the French verb, interpeller—it calls forth something from me, questions me.]

Barthes carries on this line of thought in a small passage that is worth noting: “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks” (38; cf. 55). The punctum, then, does its best work when it does not hit the Spectator over the head—this is too obvious and looks too much like advertising—but when it causes the viewer to reflect after seeing the image. This does not happen in unary photographs, which are too literal—they are pornographic rather than erotic, leaving nothing to the imagination (40–41).

For Barthes, the punctum has “more or less potentially, a power of expansion” (45)—that is, it can open up meaning rather than closing it down—and is not created deliberately by the photographer (47). It should be “revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it” (53). The punctum “is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55). Counter-intuitively, Barthes declares that “[u]ltimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes” (53).

[Observation: I think this last sentence is wonderful. It describes the power of the most striking images to remain in the imagination after the they have been viewed, allowing the viewer to keep turning them over in the mind’s eye. Barthes’ development of the punctum reminds me very much of the way the parables of Jesus function rhetorically in the Gospels: each one is a little world in itself, a little baited hook in the thought world of the hearer. They are time-release capsules that do not admit of a single, final meaning, but continue to draw the attention, like a spot—Barthes’ wound?—that goes on itching.]

Most of Part II of Camera Lucida is given over to a series of readings of photographs where Barthes walks out the insights he has outlined in Part I. He generalizes from the specific cases of individual photographs to the general case of all photographs, while illustrating by example how personal is his understanding of punctum (73–75). He returns to his earlier assertion that part of the genius of photography—as distinct from other visual arts such as painting—is the referent in each image (76–80). The photograph “is literally an emanation of the referent” (80). The photograph does not tell us what is or “what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been” (85). For this reason, a photograph is not a memory, “but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (91). Photographs are unreal and perish (92–96). A photographic “likeness” is not actually like anything, except other photographs (102–103).

Although they appear several pages before the end of the book, I think that these words sum up well where Barthes’ discussion leads: “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge” (106).

It is a mistake to look for memory and the real in a photographic image. Instead we should be aware of what we bring to the act of reading an image, recognizing the highly personal nature of the punctum that we may find in it. This is challenging enough to keep in mind as a Spectator; it is all the more difficult to swallow as an Operator.

Reference

Barthes, R. (2010) Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. (Paperback ed.) New York: Hill and Wang.

World Press Photo 2019

The World Press Photo 2019 travelling exhibit is currently on show in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. I have had the chance to visit the exhibit a few times in previous years, but I found that I saw it with different eyes this year.

Although the specifics of the images change from one year to the next, depending on where the latest trouble spots are in the world, I find that there is a sameness to the images, exhibit after exhibit. Conflict and violence occupy centre stage, as you’d expect from the world’s journalistic businesses—if it bleeds, it leads. The environment is also an area of photojournalistic attention as exploitation of the planet continues at a furious pace (one image of frogs dismembered alive for restaurants illustrates our appetite for destruction particularly well).

There are less shocking, but still dramatic, images every so often from the world of sport and there is the occasional human interest story about people with colourful costumes, interesting diets or religious practices that the media tend to depict as quaint, disturbing or both.

The difference for me this year had to do with the way I looked at the images: how they communicated as a body, rather than one by one.

The first thing I noticed is that there is still an audience for this type of photography. No matter how violent, graphic or disturbing we are fascinated by this type of photojournalism. I suppose that part of this feeds into the idea that we must document the happenings in our world, no matter how terrible they are. Or perhaps it is especially when terrible things happen that we must bear witness to them, although the witness has had little discernible success in keeping similar things from happening—how many times have we said “never again!”? Maybe the best we can hope for is that the perpetrators of this particular outrage might be brought to account, and the victims might receive some degree of recognition or vindication.

The next thing I noticed about the exhibit is that much of the coverage is of things that happen to vulnerable people in or from the developing world. Whether it is migrants to Germany turning to the sex trade just to live, a baby boom among former Colombian guerillas, or the plight of Mayan beekeepers, the collection suggests that bad things are going on among them, far away over there. Sure, Donald Trump shows up—by implication in a caravan of refugees heading to the U.S. border, or leading Emmanuel Macron by the hand—but most of the really bad stuff is happening somewhere else.

After recently reading Roland Barthes’ “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989), I was also struck by the power of the caption to “anchor” and constrain the interpretation of an image. The best example of this is the first image one sees when entering the exhibition, which is Brent Stirton‘s picture of an African woman at night, heavily camouflaged and carrying an assault weapon. Is she a guerilla? A jihadist? A government soldier? Is she attacking or is she preparing to defend? Where exactly is she? The image itself could be read in any of a dozen or more ways, but the caption ends the questioning and settles the matter (in a surprising way, for me):

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2019/37622/1/Brent-Stirton

Petronella Chigumbura (30), a member of an all-female anti-poaching unit called Akashinga, participates in stealth and concealment training in the Phundundu Wildlife Park, Zimbabwe.

I realized how often we simply we accept such captions as Gospel. But what if the caption writer gets it wrong, accidentally or by design? Is the caption a reliable guide? Has the photographer understood all the implications of his or her image, and the complexities of the context? The viewer has no way of knowing (but may accept or reject the authority of caption depending on how ‘reasonable’ or palatable it may sound).

Finally, one of the signs in the museum set me thinking about the role curation plays in an exhibition like this. The sign read, “The stories that matter.” We can take that statement at face value, but the obvious question is: to whom do they matter? Who decides? On what basis? This is certainly not a kick at the organizers of the World Press Photo Contest, but it is a reminder that we never see an unmediated or unselected image. We don’t have to cast aspersions on the motives of the people who choose images to remember that they do indeed have them. And so do we.

Reference

Barthes, R. and Sontag, S. (1989) Selected writings. Fontana.

Readings—Barthes

In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes’ (1977) main point is that it is impossible to know who is speaking in a text: is it the writer? a persona the writer has adopted? a character created in the text? a reliable narrator? other? The “death of the author,” is not so much the literal death of the individual who wrote the piece, but the impossibility of knowing whose voice is being expressed. This stands counter to any interpretation of the text that relies on divining authorial voice or intent. Instead, Barthes asserts, meaning is created as a kind of performance between the text and the mind of the reader.

The most immediate implication of this is that since meaning depends upon the interaction of text and reader, no text has a final ‘correct’ meaning—what Barthes refers to as a ‘theological’ meaning or the “‘message’ of the Author-God.” Every text is capable of bearing as many meanings as there are readers. And Barthes means this to be just as sweeping a claim as it sounds: “literature […] liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.”

This approach to meaning implies that, as the author ‘dies,’ attention shifts sharply to the role of the reader as the co-creator of potential meanings.

“Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989) begins with a discussion of how many commentators deny that imagery fits the category of a ‘language.’ The notion of a visual language is denied from both sides at once: by those who point out that images offer only a “rudimentary system” when compared with speech, and by those who see images as containing an “ineffable richness” of meaning.

To put these positions to the test, Barthes draws on advertising imagery because of its clear “intentionality.” He analyses the test image in terms of its textual content as well as in terms of the visual signs (signifiers and signifieds) that he finds in it. Barthes speaks of images as being ‘polysemous’—capable of many meanings—and identifies two key ways in which text and image may function together:

anchorage—the text interprets the image and aims to reduce its polysemy; or
relay—the text and the image work in a complementary way.

I wonder, though, if there is not a third way that text and image could affect one another: is it not possible that the image could serve as an anchor for text? Couldn’t a powerful image shape or limit the way its accompanying text would be interpreted? It seems to me that irony and sarcasm could run in both directions, telling the viewer that the accompanying text (or image) was unreliable and might be read opposite to the way that it might otherwise be understood.

Barthes ends the article with some brief ideas on what might constitute a ‘rhetoric of the image.’ Barthes suggests that the form of visual rhetoric might be similar to that of spoken rhetoric (drawing on the techniques and terminology of classical rhetoric), but that the content would need to differ. If there is indeed a visual rhetoric at work in images, whether with or without text, they would function as persuasive communications designed not to describe or portray a reality, but to shape one for the viewer. And if Barthes’ argument holds true for the world of advertising, it may be applicable beyond that world.

If so, that raises questions for me:

When looking at a given image, what reality or realities does it create for the viewer/me?
How does the image try to persuade? To what end?
How effective is the persuasion for different viewers? For example, what role does culture play in the creation of the meaning? How do different viewers ‘read’ an image?
How might this apply to the images that I create?

References

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, music, text. Hill and Wang.

Barthes, R. and Sontag, S. (1989) Selected writings. Fontana.