Roland Barthes on photography

1. Roland Barthes on photography

2. Barthes: Camera Lucida • Public / Private responses to the photograph • Barthes and the “return” to phenomenology • To define the eidos of photography • eidos = appearance, idea, constitutive nature, species • What common basis unites all our otherwise different “encounters” with photography? • The noeme or “essence” of photography • What I “intentionalize” in photography is “that-has-been.” • The “intentionality of imagination,” or a purely personal relation to the photograph

4. Barthes: the eidos of photography • The essential nature of our subjective experience of photography is defined by an irreducible singularity. • To experience time as a singular and unrepeatable event. • “Every photograph is a certification of presence” • “I want a history of looking” (12), or the irreducibility of the emotional experience of looking at photographs. • the Spectrum: the experience of being-photographed • the Spectator: the desire and emotion aroused by the act of looking at specific photographs

5. To experience time as a singular and non-repeatable event.

6. “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”

7. “. . . The Photograph . . . represents the very subtle moment when . . . I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14).

8. The studium and the punctum • The studium refers to the range of photographic meanings available and obvious to everyone. • The studium is: • Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance. • Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal comprehensible way.

10. The studium is: • Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance. • Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal comprehensible way.

11. The studium and the punctum • The punctum (Latin) = trauma (Greek) • inspires an intensely private meaning • “escapes” language--it is not easily communicated through linguistic resources • is “historical,” as an experience of the irrefutable indexicality of the photograph • The punctum as a “partial object” or detail that attracts and holds my gaze. • The photograph is a temporal hallucination (115). • the photographic and the filmic images

12. The punctum as a “partial object” or detail that attracts and holds my gaze

13. The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination . . . .” (115).