Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes Blog Post

1.   “This fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects– of all the objects in the world: who choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other? Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurrences; it aspires, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign which would afford it access to the dignity of a language; but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as mild does. Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible; it is not it that we see.” (Barthes 6)

Essentially, this paragraph discusses why we take a picture of something. Out of everything in the world you could have taken a picture of, why did you choose this? Barthes then goes on to say how each picture is really a sign, or a mark, of what is actually occurring. Therefore, the physical picture is actually invisible, but its content portrays reality. The passage helped me understand Barthes argument and gave me insight into the true meaning and use of a picture.

      2.    “Something like an essence of the Photograph floated in this particular picture. I therefore decided to “derive” all Photography (its “nature”) from the only photography which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation. All the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietzsche’s prophecy: “A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne.” The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. 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. (I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.)”

This was such an interesting part of Camera Lucida to me because it illustrates how one picture has a profoundly different effect on unique individual. For barthes, the Winter Garden Photograph meant so much to him, while it could mean nothing to anyone else. However, they might have a different photograph that means something to them. This speaks to the uniqueness of each individual and the effect of photography of their lives.

3. How is it possible that such an old picture (the subject is not even alive anymore) seems so real and alive?

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