Photographeme: Mythologizing in Camera Lucida. (Roland Barthes) (original) (raw)
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The Question of Photographic Meaning in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida
Philosophy Today , 2009
"This paper offers an interpretation of Roland Barthes’ writing on photography. Barthes uses photography to point to a third region of meaning, one which is neither public nor private and which both our theoretical and ordinary approaches to photography miss. Following Barthes’ attempts to articulate this region of meaning, the paper examines his different responses to photography and his gradual movement from punctual criticism and structural analysis toward a theory of photographic meaning. The relationship between photography and time is analyzed to show how photography can express the ephemeral nature of being as well as the arbitrariness and singularity of existence."
The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, ed. by Mark Durden and Jane Tormey, 2020
Although Roland Barthes was always reluctant to be labelled a photography theorist, he occupies a central position within the discourse owing to his semiotic analyses of the 1960s and his canonical, phenomenologically-oriented Camera Lucida (from 1980). In addition, several of Barthes’ posthumous publications deal with photography to various degrees, including Mourning Diary, his lecture series at the Collège de France The Preparation of the Novel, his seminar “Proust and Photography,” and his fragmentary project “Autobiography in Images.” This chapter reassesses Barthes’ contribution to photography theory in the context of these posthumous publications and unpublished archival material and evaluates the extent to which they shed a new or different light on some of his well-known arguments and ideas. Against the wider background of his strong opposition of photographic representation to language, this chapter shows that the reassessment of Barthes’ work on photography extends as far back in time as to his second book, the 1954 biography of Jules Michelet, seldom mentioned in relation to his writing on photography, although clearly relevant to it. It demonstrates that a phenomenological, affective, and autobiographical approach to photography is characteristic of his entire engagement with the medium – interrupted by his semiotic-structuralist phase – rather than only a feature of his late work as has hitherto been assumed to be the case.
Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual
Substance, 2010
There is a well-worn narrative, perhaps even a "mythology," according to which Roland Barthes undergoes two distinct phases as a theorist. In the first phase, he is the mythologist-semiologist who crusades against the "pseudo-physis" of culture, unmasking its myths and decoding its signs. In the second phase, he retreats to the immediacy of his moods and passions, more interested in desire than demystification, in pleasure than politics. At first glance, these opposing tendencies play out nowhere more emphatically than in Barthes's writings on cinematic and photographic images. While his early semiological texts strive to demystify the apparent immediacy of images by showing how they operate as signs, his later writings celebrate precisely those elements of the image that elude signification-the punctum of the photograph, the "obtuse meaning" of the film-dimensions of the image that can be seen but not described, sensed but not linguistically signified.
The Photograph as Trace: Barthes, Benjamin, and the Intermediality of Photographic Discourse’
Mosaic. An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, special issue on Camera Lucida, vol. 53.4, 2020
Drawing on archival discoveries, this essay analyzes the specific publications and material-cultural contexts linking Barthes’s and Benjamin’s theories of photography. It focuses on the research and writing of La Chambre claire, its visual allusions to the “Little History of Photography,” and the wider circulation of the photographs central to these texts.