viz.

Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography  trans.  Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981).  

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, semiotician, and major contributor to structuralist and post-structuralist thought.  His most famous works include a collection of essays Mythologies (1957) in which he explores the intersection of semiology and Marxist critique and his essay “The Death of the Author” (1968) in which he considers the impossibility of identifying authorial intent because of the many possibilities for interpretation in any text.  In 1981, Barthes brought his attention to the study of signs and language to the topic of photography with Camera Lucida.

A central component in Camera Lucida is Barthes’ consideration of a picture of his mother taken when she was a child as she posed in a garden.  This “Winter Garden Photograph” is the only image that Barthes discusses at length but does not reproduce within his text.  Writing shortly after her death, Barthes recounts his desire to know and to recognize his mother as he pours over the photographs left behind in her apartment.  The image of his mother as a young child leads Barthes to confront the connection between photography and death.  All photographs carry an indexical relationship to their referents—Barthes notes that he “can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past” (Camera Lucida, 76.  Emphasis in original).  Barthes labels this persistent presence of the referent the essence of photography and the “That-has-been.”  In other words, he cannot refute the reality of his mother’s presence within that winter garden many years before he knew her.  Each picture, and for Barthes especially this picture of his mother, also conveys its relationship to time and hence to death.  In a point of connection to Sontag’s assertions that a photograph can record the light that has emanated off a referent years and years before, Barthes notes that the “That-has-been” is a frozen moment that will “touch [him] like the delayed rays of a star” and so the photograph carries with it an element of what we might call this-will-die (Camera Lucida, 81).  In other words, Barthes can see in the “Winter Garden Photograph” both the reality of his mother before he knew her and he can recognize that she will die.

Barthes also provides two useful—and for him, interrelated—terms for approaching an analysis of any photograph: the studium and the punctum.  Barthes identifies the studium as a kind of general interest in the image for what it tells the viewer about the historical context in which the photograph was taken and in which the photograph is viewed.  Barthes always grounds the experience of the studium in the viewer (and always himself in these personal musings); he notes that by way of the studium he can enjoy the photograph as political testimony, historical document, or cultural testament to the gestures, settings, figures, faces of an earlier time (Camera Lucida, 26).  The punctum, for Barthes, disturbs an appreciation of the studium.  He describes the punctum as an element of the photograph that pricks, wounds, or stings him.  This punctum can be a tiny glint in the eye of a person caught unposed in the background of an image or an uncovered foot of a corpse lying in the street of a war-torn city.  Just as with the studium, the punctum is grounded in the experience of the viewer.  Recognition of the punctum is often an accidental and is always a highly subjective response—in fact, the punctum for Barthes in “The Winter Garden” photograph is his recognition of the “This-has-been” and “This-will-die.”  It is through both punctum and studium that Barthes identifies the contextual and the personal within photographs.

Many of these essays are extremely dense and unraveling them might make for a difficult task in any undergraduate class aside from, perhaps, an upper division seminar dedicated to the study of visual rhetoric or photography.  Indeed, Barthes can be so complex and occasionally so infuriating, that I might consider excerpting a few of his more approachable passages—such as the studium and the punctum—discussing each with students, and then practicing application of these two terms to several images.  Working extensively through the nuances of Barthes’ argument may, however, be helpful for instructors of visual rhetoric interested in the semiotics of photography or the history of photography theory. 

Works cited and other works of interest

Barthes, Roland.  Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.  New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Trans. Richard Howard.

Orvell, Miles.  American Photography.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Sontag, Susan.  On Photography.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.  Rpt. 1977.

______.  Regarding the Pain of Others.  New York: Picador, 2003.

Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: essays on photographies and histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.