I have read book before but had just skimmed over part 1 as I had felt part 2 was more relevance to my research so this is a more holistic view of this written work which I feel is needed as a pre-cursor to my literature review.

This book was written after the death of Barthes’ mother in 1977 and published in the same year as the death of Barthes in 1980.

It is split into two parts. Part one deals with the ideas of what photography is while part two explores history and time and the search for the essential essence in a photograph.

Part one

The thing which the camera captures is something that only happens once and can never be repeated yet when we look at what has been captured in a photograph it is the subject we see and not the photograph. Barthes speaks of the feeling of amazement looking at a photograph of Napoleon’s brother and his feeling of wonder that the eyes he could see in the photograph had looked at the Emperor. He speaks of nobody else sharing his amazement and him forgetting all about this. “life consists of these little touches of solitude” (Barthes, 1981, p3) Barthes tells us that the photograph is invisible. He uses the term referent, or in other words what the photograph refers to and signifier which relates to semiotics or the study of signs. The photograph is rarely distinguished as being different from what is represented in the photograph. To determine the photographic signifier, the audience must reflect or be in possession of prior knowledge to allow for this secondary action. Barthes tries to understand photography saying that a photograph can be the object of three practices, or three emotions or three intensions; to do, to undergo and to look which map to the activities of the photographer, the audience and the target of the photography. He calls these The Operator, The Spectator and The Spectrum of the photograph. Each of these experiences the act of photography differently, the Operator sees first hand or at least through a viewfinder (or these days through an LCD screen), the Spectator is removed for the immediacy of Operator through the action of chemicals and printing while the Spectrum is on the other side of the lens. More that this, Barthes introduces idea of photography being a return of the dead. The spectrum or eidolon speaks of a spectre.  He writes of having his photograph taken and feeling compelled to pose as if for the lens he becomes a different version of himself, an object. That object can be seen as death so the photographer must try to avoid the capture of death. “Death is the eidos of that photograph” (Barthes, 1981, p. 15) I take this to mean that the frozen expression captured by the photograph is as of death.

Barthes speaks of taste and preferences in photographs and what he likes and doesn’t and that these likes can be shifted by mood. In considering likes and dislikes, Barthes speaks of a specific image reaches him and he feels animated and in turn animates the photograph. An interesting thought that in being engaged by a photograph it is given life. At the same time, he speaks of the grief and pathos of which the photograph is made from or contains. The photograph for purely sentimental reasons.

Barthes wonders about the duality of some images and wonders why he is attracted in a ‘polite’ way to some images. He speaks of studium, which returns to his semiological approach using the term stadium by which he means historical, social or cultural meanings extracted by analysing signs. In the works he quotes by the photographer Koen Wessing taken in war-torn Nicaragua he points out the contrast of nuns and soldiers. “They expressed the dignity and horror of rebellion, but in my eyes they bore no mark or sign : their homogeneity remained cultural: they were scenes.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 25) He contrasts the studium with the punctum which is the prick, the photograph which grabs the attention whether by shock or emotion or for another reason. Barthes produces a fascinating glimpse into what he means by studium and punctum in relation to a photograph of Lewis Payne.

Alexander Gardner, 1865, Lewis Payne

Payne had tried to assassinate the Secretary of State. The photograph shows a young handsome figure seemingly relaxed but wearing manacles. This is the studium. The punctum is the fact that Payne is in his cell waiting on his execution.

He goes on to say that a good photographer might be better at looking for the photographic shock and in trying to reveal something that was hidden. Barthes has an idea of what makes a photograph interesting to him and mentions that “the photograph becomes ‘surprising’ when we do not know why it has been taken” He questions the motive and what interest behind the photographer’s choices saying that what was once notable, by familiarity, becomes less notable.  (Barthes, 1981, p. 34)

Barthes tells us that if the photograph is outside meaning then to signify meaning the photograph must take on a mask. However, society mistrusts the meaning contained within photography and might want a less harsh view, surrounded by noise. Barthes explains that he does not mean the effect of a photograph but it’s meaning. Many photographs miss this summit of meaning and instead stop the viewer and make us think.  “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatises, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 38)

Barthes then move on to mention that photography is the ghost of painting and returns to his theme of death. He says that photography has a sense of the theatre with its cult of the dead, whether the face with makeup seen in Chinese or Indian theatre or with the masks in Japanese theatre and that “photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead,”(Barthes, 1981, pp. 31–32)

Part two

In the second part of the book, which I initially assumed had more relevance to my project, Barthes describes the death of his mother and of looking for her essence in photographs left behind. He writes of his feelings that none of the photographs spoke to him, “none seemed to me really ‘right’: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 64) He discovered a photograph taken in 1898 of his mother when she was aged 5 next to her brother posing at a Winter Garden.  Interestingly, Barthes sees this as a personal photogrph and while he describes it in some detail, he does not reproduce the work.  This is interesting to me that the photograph remains unseen.

“The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glasses-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing, along which he had extended one arm; she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera; you could tell that the photographer had said, “Step forward a little so we can see you”; she was holding one finger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of their parents, who were soon to divorce, had posed side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house where my mother was born, in Chennevières-sur-Marne).”(Barthes, 1981, pp. 67–69)

This very idea of describing a photograph and explaining it has a certain power. We are used to the idea that a photograph contains a 1,000 words yet reversing this and forcing the reader to imagine this scene rather than to see it, speaks to me of the sentimentality which Barthes associates with that image.

To Barthes this photograph contained the prick that tweaked his psyche and reminded him most of his mother in terms of her expression, the honesty of her pose and the capture of her personality. His sense that here was a photograph which spoke to him of a time and a place that his mother and her brother were present. Barthes’ sense in the apparent truth of this photograph and ultimately the truth of photography itself. Barthes write, “I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.” (Barthes, 1981, p.7 3) Barthes does not reproduce this photograph in his book as he claims, “It only exists for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of a thousand manifestations of the ordinary” (Barthes, 1981, p.7 3)

This is an interesting concept in relation to my project. I choose to show the indifferent which has personal meaning to me and whether or not the audience can find their own meaning from my work, that is out with my control. To use the language of Barthes, “Henceforth I would have to consider to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself.” (Barthes, 1981, p.7 6) The photographic work I will create in my future using the past images of my son and daughter at the most basic meaning, shows that my daughter and my son once lived and, as I write this, that my son still lives. Move forward in time and, should my work still survive, then myself and my subjects and my work will all be of the past, and will all be dead. How then, to find a way to convey the relevance this work has to me and to pass this to my audience? This idea echoes a topic I discussed with my tutor about graveyards and commemoration. Only through living relatives or people who remember the deceased, is there a sense of who this person was. Only then is there a specific reason to visit their grave or to care for the grave marker. One the link to the living is broken, the grave is of an unknown or forgotten person. It seems to lose meaning. Physically without anyone to care for it, the grave deteriorates and often the words on the tomb stone might erode and vanish as do the buried remains. The memories which go with the physical remains and the grave with its memorials slowly vanishes. Barthes speaks of the idea of the immortal photograph. “The loved body is immortalized by the mediation of…..alchemy.” (Barthes, 1981, p.81) This idea of the immortal photograph, of showing something which must have existed at one instant in time is interesting to contrast with the idea of medical photography. If I photograph a person in a particular landscape, then I can say that person lived and was there in front of my lens in that place and time. However, if a radiologist photographs the inside of that person’s head, there is no sense of who that person was or is nor of where the image was captured. I cannot even say if that person was alive or dead when the scan was captured. We cannot recognise an individual from a medical scan and as for place, it seems to be a homogenous “room in a hospital” completely indistinct from any other space within that hospital or any other hospital. It is stripped down photography that in many ways has become meaningless other than to specialist medical practitioners.  My work, in attempting to bring life to such scans and to give the scans emotions, a sense of gesture and the personality of a real person and also, however briefly, of my own personality which will endow my work with my own feelings perhaps including my grief, loss, humour and many other things, is perhaps a simple project around putting a sense of time and place and who back into these works. It is interesting then to look at any artwork and consider how much of a sense of the artist comes through. Does an artist need to stand beside the audience and explain? How is audience reaction to an artwork changed with no input from an artist, often because they might be dead? Is an audience reaction any less valid without input from the artist?

References

Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Vintage Books.

Garner, A (1865) Lewis Payne [Photograph] Available at https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/lewis-payne-1865 (Accessed 22nd March 2022)