Academic literature on the topic 'Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida'

IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES'S subject is the significance of photography's defining characteristic: the photograph's inseparable relation to its subject, that which ''must have been'' in front of the camera's lens. Or so it would seem. The present reading of Camera Lucida argues that Barthes's essay actually shows photography's nature as dependent not only on the intimate relation to its object, commonly termed ''indexical,'' but in accord with its relation to its user, its beholder. An examination of Barthes's encounters with photographs in Camera Lucida reveals the way in which identification and misidentification figure into the viewing of images, and suggests that contact between the beholder and the photograph actually eclipses the relation between the photograph and its subject. Barthes's focus on the emotional response of the viewer disguises the fact that he misidentified key details in Camera Lucida's photographs, most significantly in a 1927 portrait by James Van Der Zee and in the ''Winter Garden Photograph.'' This latter photograph of Barthes's recently deceased mother as a small child is famously not illustrated in the book. This essay argues that it is fictional. These ''mistakes'' suggest that Camera Lucida undermines its ostensible basis in indexicality. The subject did not have to be in front of the camera after all. The present rereading of the text from this point of view articulates a notion of performativity according to which the nature of the contact that exists between the image and the viewer informs the way an image is understood. Barthes's desire to find his mother again through her photograph to a large extent acts out his desire to re(per)form and make permanent his relation to her, a desire that he elucidates in the process of describing his search for her picture and his reaction to it when he finds it. This performative element is charged with identification; the person the narrator (Barthes) seeks, in his mother, is himself. A close analysis of the ''Winter Garden Photograph,'' as described by Barthes, shows how performances of identification are inscribed with gender and familial configurations.

In the light of the publication of Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary (2009), this essay examines how the influential theory of the photographic punctum has cinematic roots which are repressed in Barthes's Camera Lucida (1980). My aim is not to repeat familiar arguments about how Barthes's ‘The Third Meaning’ (1970) anticipates the photographic punctum in a cinematic context; it is, rather, to attend specifically to Mourning Diary as a much closer, more precise precursor which has been visible only since 2009, and which casts new light upon the work of Roland Barthes.

I first encountered Roland Barthes�s Camera Lucida�(1980) in 2012 when I was developing a performance on falling and photography. Since then I have re-encountered Barthes�s book annually as part of my practice-as-research PhD project on the relationships between performance and photography. This research project seeks to make performance work in response to Barthes�s book � to practice with Barthes in an exploration of theatricality, materiality and affect. This photo-essay weaves critical discourse with performance documentation to explore my relationship to Barthes�s book. Responding to Michael Fried�s claim that Barthes�s Camera Lucida is an exercise in �antitheatrical critical thought� (Fried 2008, 98) the essay seeks to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida. Specifically, by exploring Barthes�s conceptualisation of the pose I discuss how performance practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in Barthes�s text. Additionally, I argue for Barthes�s book as an example of philosophy as performance and for my own work as an instance of performance philosophy.

Though explicit references to music are infrequent in Barthes's Collège de France lectures, Barthes's use of music in other work from the 1970s makes it clear that music can act as a fruitful analogy in consideration of the text. This article uses the serialist or atonal analogy, as set up by Barthes in ‘From Work to Text’ and elsewhere, to examine the structuring of Comment vivre ensemble and The Neutral. In viewing these courses as serial or open works we can, it is hoped, arrive at a fuller understanding of their methodology and the role they ascribe to the listener or reader. The atonal analogy, however, is left behind in 1978, as Barthes's major projects (La Préparation du roman and Camera Lucida) employ more conventional, developmental structuring. It is here, then, that the analogy with tonality, again suggested by Barthes, can be usefully employed.

El presente artículo pretende dar cuenta de las limitantes de la propuesta teórica de Roland Barthes para analizar la fotografía en tanto ésta se considere a la luz del programa fenomenológico del filósofo francés. Dada la importancia de la teoría de Barthes en el campo de la fotografía, creemos que dichas limitantes sólo son perceptibles si el programa de Barthes se lee desde una postura intermedial, es decir, desde la relación que la fotografía —en tanto re-presentación material de la realidad— presupone y desarrolla en torno a sí con respecto a instancias histórico-mediáticas que se encuentran en contradicción a las esencias regionales reconocidas por Barthes, tal como lo intentamos hacer en el presente trabajo. De esta forma, la fotografía se presenta como un suplemento que pretende colmar, materialmente, la realidad. Un suplemento que, tanto en su constitución como en sus consecuencias, se basa en un sustrato metafísico, a saber, el aparecimiento absoluto o absoluto aparecimiento del objeto fotografiado.

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

Abstract The reader’s subjective experience cannot be easily integrated into an interpretation that claims a certain objectivity and adequacy to the text. For the exegesis of sacred texts, this means that something unspeakable remains, the encounter of which is traditionally described with the theological categories revelation and salvation. This raises the suspicion that by methodically excluding subjectiveness, at least part of the theological character of a text gets lost in interpretation. In order to exemplify the challenge subjectivity poses to scientific interpretation, especially within the framework of a religious community, this paper analyzes documents of the Catholic Church on the interpretation of the bible since 1965. In a next step, the categories of revelation and salvation are traced in Roland Barthes’ essay Camera Lucida (1980). His concepts shed light on the shortcomings of the documents and provide fresh impulses for a transformed understanding and appreciation of the reader’s experience.