Camera Lucida

"Despite the deep admiration for Sontag I just expressed, now that you mention Barthes, I have to confess that Camera Lucida is perhaps my favourite book ever about art. Barthes’ identification of the ça-a-été (or the ‘that-has-been’) as the essence of photography and his theorization of the punctum or accidental detail are two central ideas to which I return time and again. There’s something so surprising about Camera Lucida , probably because it’s so subjective and fragmentary; it feels as though we’ve been invited into the author’s most intimate train of thought. It wasn’t an especially well-received book when it came out precisely because it was regarded as too sentimental. There was too much pathos. It speaks in a confessional mode that avant-garde modernism rejected wholeheartedly. Camera Lucida is not the semiotic Barthes of “The Photographic Message” but the more vulnerable Barthes of A Lover’s Discourse . There’s this sense of wounded distraction and absorption that comes back to haunt the discussion. But in the end, he nevertheless offered us that lasting reflection upon the difference between the mobile image – the self captured in a photograph or the presence of a person captured in a photograph – versus the profound self that one is left with when one is left alone in solitary intimacy. In this regard, we could even say it shares certain similarities with Dürer’s Self-Portrait . But it’s also so much more than that. At the time of writing, Barthes was still doing the work of mourning of his mother’s death. His thoughts on photography, memory, and portraiture are framed by that melancholic sense of remembering his mother not only by looking at images – photographs – of her but also through a process of writing about those pictures. There is that evocative passage when he finds a photograph of his mother before he was born and he writes “I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember”. The portrait operates like a memento mori, certainly, but it also functions as a portal to another historical moment — one that occurred before us, but that also possesses the power to survive beyond us. When I look at portraits, I always have that sinking feeling: this person existed and now I am looking at him or her. Barthes says this at the beginning of Camera Lucida when he comes across the photograph of the brother of Napoleon and suddenly he realizes that “I am looking at eyes that looked at the emperor” . Even with personal photographs of an unknown person, there is that sense that someone gazed upon this face, possibly with some affection, and took this photograph to preserve a memory of that individual and that, somehow, that portrait has survived and found its way to us. “One day, probably sooner than we anticipate, Facetime, Skype, and Snapchat will seem extremely old fashioned” I think painting, sculpture, and even architecture are able to create that for spectators as well. Photography is something that we’re so accustomed to now as a part of our lives, but if you think about oil painting, it, too, was once a new medium, once a new technology in the fifteenth century. All those translucent glazes reflected light and colour in a manner that made the image seem so much more alive and real than tempera or fresco had before. Portraits rendered in oil painting were, for Renaissance viewers, as close to an indexical stamp of the body of the sitter as they could possibly have imagined within the technological means available to them at the time. One of the important things to remember is that every historical moment has its new technology that will then become outdated. One day, probably sooner than we anticipate, Facetime, Skype, and Snapchat will seem extremely old fashioned, but for now they are what seems modern to us. It’s so interesting to think as a historian about Sontag and Barthes writing at the end of the seventies, reflecting upon the power of the image to be philosophical and to shift the world and the way we think. Sontag enables the photograph to stall what she so beautifully coins as “time’s relentless melt”, whereas for Barthes the process of attrition begins from the moment that the shutter snaps. From that instance, everything becomes micro instances of loss. So, you have a different drive behind the two authors and yet they both have this way of thinking about the pathos of the image in ways that nevertheless allow for emotion and sentiment in a history of art."