(A critical discussion of:)

La Chambre Claire, Note sur la photographie (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)

by Roland Barthes, A biography)

The short book by Barthes is a very personal approach towards describing an essence of photography.

The booklet derives from an ontological desire to describe photography as such. Does photography have its proper spirit ? Classifications applied to photography (empirical, retorical, esthetical) turn out not to be typical. Rather, its disorder is paramount. The stubborn persistence of the referent in each photograph resists reduction. Barthes rather speaks of a photograph, this or that photograph, from his point of view, from being moved.

The point of view taken by Barthes is not typical of a scholarly text. Rather than to abstractly classify, analyze, etcetera, he claims a personal point of view, from which he attempts to derive an ontology. Surely, this claim and point of view are very original and interesting. We will not analyze the specifics of this viewpoint here, since it would entail a proper analysis of language, language games, and perhaps the academic langauge game, but we will accept the explicit point of view as given, and of value.

Barthes distinguishes the Operator (the photographer, who perceives the optical image), the Spectrum (the target, the referent) and the Spectator (the viewer of the photograph) and claims the latter role. Nevertheless, he analyzes how it feels to pose, to be photographed, to become an object, inauthentic, to become a spectrum, dead. Does/Can the image coincide with me ? (He will later argue that traits, partial truths might be revealed.)

Barthes, in arguing why he dislikes or likes particular photographs, identifies the importance of the adventure in the photograph, and whether it animates. He then distinguishes two main elements in each animating photograph. On the one hand, the studium (the human interest raised by the photograph, the polite attention it receives), and the punctum (the detail that sticks, penetrates, pierces). (Important example photographs are discussed.)

Photography is pure contingency, claims Barthes, to surprise the noteworthy, which soon incorporates everything. Photography gives the object a mask of pure meaning. In the photograph, the studium co-exists with the punctum which is immediate, requires no analysis, and is a detail which tends to expand. The punctum contrary to the studium is not coded. (Barthes is a realist.) The punctum is that which one adds, yet is there: a blind spot.

It appears to Barthes, concluding part I, that his pleasure is insufficient a mediator to discover the nature of photography -- he starts to self-analyze more deeply.

We can summarize that Barthes argues that photography acts most importantly without mediator, in part due to the apparent presence of the referent. His distinction between studium and punctum would seem to be a simpe scheme for analysis of many photographs which will have its merits in particular instances. However, it remains a fairly simple scheme to analyze the attractiveness (animation) of a particular photograph. (One could for instance replace it by a scheme in which one demands that in a photography no particular point draws attention, yet every detail on its own does. More complicated versions can easily be imagined, and do serve in practice.) I believe it is very interesting that Barthes analyzes particular photographs, and describes his view of them in detail to us, in order to distill an essence of photography. (See below.)

In part II Barthes looks for and finds a good photography of his recently deceased mother. He does recognize her, finally, in a photography of 1898, when she was five years old, in which she seems innocent, unsupposing. He reflects on the nature of time, history (what happened before we lived), the mortal aspect of photography, the way our parents tend to become our children.

He does not view the photo as constituting part of the family, of the family album, or as a Mother. It just refers to a necessarily real thing that was photographed. (Unless, it is not a photograph.) It was. The photograph establishes a fact without method. Since "it was", one wonders inevitably about the here and now as well. The photography makes as sure about the past, which we like so much. The past is real, is authenticated. The "It was" is a new punctum: time. (Again, Barthes gives examples.)

Flat, photography is flat, it does not ressemble but reveals, bits and pieces of truth. It is a violent filling of the view (That's it. It was.) It's a bizar medium, associated to madness and pity, which we counter with the term "Art", or by generalizing photography until it de-realizes. Raw photography can be extatic, while imposing rules can render it docile.

Summary and final comments: Barthes places a personal picture at the center of his concept of photography. (He does not show us the photograph.) He exclaims the significance he finds in this fashion: It was ! That's it ! There by he admits to having gone through the strange process of writing a book about what seem like trivialities. I believe that Barthes here comes very close to a Wittgensteinian point of view, in which we can merely show (point at, make people look at) things to other people. (It is a primitive language game.) Barthes would not have liked this analysis. Yet, it is my opinion that he reconstructs this point of view of Wittgenstein II, and adds to it (implicitly) the important observation that photography is eminently suited to point. (Wittgenstein too, it is my belief, tended more and more towards rather writing novels than philosophy.)

"La Chambre claire", Oeuvres complètes de Roland Barthes, édition établie et présentée par Éric Marty, Paris, Seuil, 1995-1996 (trois tomes), tome III, p. 1169.

Copyright 2005 by Jan Troost