So . . . our first foray off of the Time Magazine list. And one which has some relevance to the book just finished: Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. But, to that in a bit . . .
Barthes is attempting to get at the idea of Photography or the Photograph (capitalized whenever used in that sense), the Heideggerian thing-in-itself (a variant of the Kantian Ding an Sich). It is interesting that—at least in the first several sections of the text—there is dancing all around Heideggerian ideas, yet there is no mention of him. But the same could be said for the work of the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin; his seminal piece “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is evoked (if not invoked) when Barthes notes:
The first thing I found was this. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. [4]
A photograph is and is not what it (re)presents: it is an opportunity to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself, while the pointing finger and the moon are also experienced as one “event,” an inseperable lamination. One wonders if such difficulties arose in the use of other media to (re)produce images before the advent of photography; did such uncanny experiences—the disorder, dilemma, discomfort, dis-ease, defamiliarization—arise when viewing a painted portrait, for instance?
We are going to bring to our reading of Barthes the sensibilities and experiences of what he calls the Operator. We have both taken images as well as both having been taken (surprised, as Barthes has it) by images and having both been image-ed. How will this deeper perspective—Barthes is only approaching the Photograph from the aspects of Spectator and Spectrum—affect/effect our reading of his reading of the Photograph?
And speaking of reading photographs . . . let’s go back to the opening (and closing) of the embedded text of The Blind Assassin:
She retrieves the photograph when she’s alone, and lies it flat on the table and stares down into it. She examines every detail: his smoky fingers, the bleached folds of their clothing, the unripe apples hanging in the tree, the dying grass in the foreground. Her smiling face. [517]
This is the sort of experience of a photograph that Barthes is getting at in terms of his project being a working out from personal experience of a few images to some sort of general sense of the Photograph (pp. 8 and 9). I am sure that one of our topics of discussion will be whether he actually gets there.
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You walk through an art gallery, patiently reading the over-intellectualized description that is meant to inform you that you haven’t got the degree to stand where you are, and someone sidles up to you and says, “What do you see?” Barthes is looking at photographs and giving us his answers. In this sense it is fascinating. In another sense I can’t help but feel he should be writing the little over-intellectualized descriptions for these photographs should you ever see them in a gallery.
Barthes weaves a personal thread of deconstruction through various photographs, which I appreciate on a creative analysis level, but the end result fails to move me in any sane direction. Take chapter 45 (p107) where he describes the air of a Photograph. I understand that the use of air is a failure of language but is it really prudent to attribute an air of goodness to an Avedon photograph? Am I being too snide? If Avedon can make Marilyn Monroe look vulnerable, he could probably give Idi Amin an air of goodness. Poor Avedon! I have stereotyped him. Perhaps he is the best example of air.
The sadness I discovered in Camera Lucida is, of course, the death of the author’s mother. He struggles with what is communicated by his personal photographs, how deeply he feels for this evidence made by a provincial photographer. He clamors inside himself and worries for his own air and if he has any air at all. As an aside on his air, compare the Camera Lucida cover photograph of Barthes to his wiki entry.
I have no idea if this was foresight on Barthes’ part but I appreciate the lack of detail of the photographic process. There is no discussion of film type, lenses, camera brands, or technique, and I find it particularly interesting that the only color plate in the book is from a polaroid. The work was published in 1980; before digital photography and the ubiquitous cell-phone camera.
I am surprised there was no mention of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who eschewed the photographic process in favor of full-frame, in-the-viewfinder, composition. He used high-speed black and white film solely so he could be stealthy. His goal was to capture that decisive moment of an event.
The memorable portrait photographers—Avedon, Scavullo, sure, but we might relate better to Liebovitz or Arbus—know that there are few moments where the subject lets their guard down and allows some essence of personality (air?) to emerge. There is something in the photograph you understand even if you don’t know the subject. If you do know the subject you know if this essence, that decisive moment of exposure (sorry … guardlessness?), has been captured.
Barthes’ provincial photographer has captured, either intentionally or accidentally, the air of his mother, ruthless evidence that she was beautifully alive at that decisive moment.