On page 5 Barthes states, “A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent…It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself.” This passage presents the leading idea for the entire book and provides the lens through which Barthes views and understands photography (and wants the readers to view and understand photography). To put it simply, Barthes is saying that photographs and the objects depicted/subjects are inherently tied to one another; they are unextractable. Photographs, according to Barthes, will never function as separate entities, never viewed as in and of themselves, but as proof or evidence of the subject.
On page 115 Barthes states, “…with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. 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, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”)…” This passage serves as the conclusion of the book and thus serves as Barthes’ final reflection on photography and its noeme (as he calls it). It perfectly summarizes what all the previous discussions and musings about the photographs have been attempting to explain. Photography is a “bizarre medium”; it is an “uncertain art” that exists in a strange, unclassifiable middle ground. Barthes, essentially, is positing that the Photograph exists in a universe all its own; the images and objects depicted in photographs are not there in front of us but they were, at some point in time, in front of someone. Photographs are evidential and are proof that their subjects did exist in that state, even if they no longer do.
How do the advent of photoshopping and the increased use of apps like VSCO and Facetune fit into Barthes’ reflections on photography?
Your interpretation of the passage from part 2 helped me understand Barthes’ message better. I can see how he has defined photography as its own thing, too specific to the idea of capturing a moment with the inevitable passage of time.
I like the use of a passage at the very beginning of the text, and then comparing it with Barthes’ thoughts by the end of his book. He establishes the noeme of Photography as something established as early as page 5: the undeniable referent present. Although this may seem like the whole book is for naught, your interpretation of the latter passage clearly explores another aspect of photographs: the element of time, and this concept of photos acting as a “temporal hallucinations”.