Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Barthes starts with an attempt to identify the (metaphysical) essence of photography as a form of human interaction with the surrounding world which ultimately changes the human society and history. “I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” (12). Barthes plays with subjectivity as represented/lived/constructed in photos: “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 the art… each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthencity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares)” (13). Barthes discusses photography as a way to objectify a person; this brings him to a curious conclusion (made in the form of an almost marginal note) of why the private space has political importance: “The ‘private life’ is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect). Curiously, he discusses it as “zone of space, of time”—exactly in the form, in which it will be curious to discuss things in Koselleckian perspective: as chronotopes, things as encapsulating the temporal perspective.

Things bring Barthes to discuss two dimensions of photography: studium – the objective information that any image conveys – and punctum – its phenomenological part which is in its spectator, but is never in its contents. Barthes’s study then turns into the examination of this phenomenological essence of photography, which from this place separates our research agendas (mine and Barthes’s). Curiously, studium isn’t actually ‘objectively’ there in the photo: in order to understand it (to understand the ‘message’ as Michael Silverstein would put it), one “requires the rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture” (26).