“We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.” (Barthes, 1981)
The notion that all photographs relate fundamentally to death plays heavily throughout the text and there are also frequent bouts of what could be construed as scorn towards the photographic medium, again calling into question the objectivity of the discourse. The author also frequently denies that the photographic image can be reduced to the codes of languages or indeed culture, in sharp contrast to his earlier work on semiotic analysis that made him so recognised and respected:
“The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... 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'): a mad image, chafed by reality.” (Barthes, 1981)
Either by advocacy or criticism the essay has become a very well known, highly regarded and widely referenced text. The circumstances surrounding the construction of the text are crucial to understanding the mindset of the author during its composition. When Barthes wrote Camera Lucida: Notes on photography, it is starkly apparent that his words and attitude are incredibly influenced (and it could equally be argued that because of this these words made more glib, or perhaps even aphoristic) by the grief brought upon by the death of his mother:
“...the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.” (Barthes, 1981)
Whilst there is a significant argument for a relationship between photography and death throughout Camera Lucida: Notes on photography, it could be considered that there is also a much stronger case to be made for the relationship between the camera and love; not only as being the impetus behind such a text but as a more valid correlation between itself and the photograph than death. As Barthes states:
“It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.” (Barthes, 1981)
Whilst this statement is clear in its intention it should be considered that it could be construed as contradictory when put into context. Whilst Barthes frequently asserts the relationship between the photograph and death or the deceased he also, seemingly inadvertently (and perhaps without conscious knowledge), hints towards the notion that it could be love, rather than death which is the larger determining factor in this field. This intimation is subtle but exists consistently and palpably in other areas of the book:
“In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.” (Barthes, 1981)
This statement, whilst posited in a tone which implies a certain disdain towards the arrogance of the photographer and their chosen medium also affirms, through the acknowledgement of self importance within the photographer that he or she must have a firm belief in the value or worth of the images they set out to capture, further implying an inherent, intrinsic or learned duty of care for the medium, a passion for the photographic process or even love for either the craft or the subject matter of their art.
Sigmund Freud’s work has formed the basis of the efforts of many notable psychologists and theorists on the subject of the still image and the human desires of what is found to be appealing or compelling within such art. Freud’s notion of eros (associated with libido and an instinctive drive to create) and thanatos (connected with a wish to find peace or escape the pain of reality, through distractions such as fiction and media) underpin much of these studies. These two instinctual drives within humans could be considered in a more elucidatory manner as sex and death, and Freud affirmed that these two internal desires constitute a force, the ‘id’, within humankind which is consistently repressed throughout one’s lifetime (tested by Freud largely through the analysis of dreams and free association) (Freud, 1971). These inherent desires, once repressed, will inevitably manifest themselves in other areas of human behaviour, sometimes with negative consequences (as homophobia, or racism for example).
It is important to appreciate the motives behind the ideas Barthes puts forward in Camera Lucida: Notes on photography because of the crucial distinction between the illustrated fixation with death as it relates to photography and the more authentic and tangible causes and relationships which are those of photography and love. It is the love for his mother Henriette, which causes Barthes to write in the manner he does about the photographs that stir emotions within him. These emotions quickly reduce his criticism of photography to a bitter and melancholy account of his struggle to find the essence, or desired ‘punctum’ (Fried, 2005), of his mother’s image in the array of pictures he has at his disposal, under the guise of a conceptual link between photographs and death.
With the same manner in which Kathy Myers stated that ‘Images themselves cannot be characterised as either pornographic or erotic. The photographic/erotic distinction can only be applied by looking at how the image is contextualised through its mode of address and the conditions of its production and consumption.’ (Myers, 1987), it can as well be argued that this is also true of the photographic image and Barthes’ assertions of its relationship to death. Barthes’ own subjective involvement with the still images of his own considered selection forms the basis of creation upon which he builds the foundations of the notions contained within Camera Lucida: Notes on photography. In much the same approach one could view the picture in Figure one (Roland Barthes with students from his 1974 Seminar at the École des Hautes Études) with a similar emotional response as Barthes’ reaction when viewing pictures of his deceased mother, should the viewer have such an emotional attachment to Barthes in the first place. The response would also be tangible should the viewer merely have the prior knowledge of who Barthes is and that he is now himself deceased.
Most of the major figures in psychoanalysis including Freud, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan agree that what fuels creative drive is a response to something missing. For Lacan in particular this was driven by a visual recognition of our complete mirror image when, as small children, we had very limited control over our physical body (Lacan, 1991). This ties in heavily with Kristeva’s work on abjection but more crucially it is this profound sense of loss which permeates throughout Barthes’ work in Camera Lucida: Notes on photography, and also removes the objectivity from the book which one would normally and usually expect from such an important text, particularly one which purports to be academic in delivery and value, but especially one which has become such an important point of reference for an entire artistic discipline.
Bibliography
Allen, Graham. Camera Lucida, The Impossible Text. Taylor Francis Routledge. Ebsco Publishing: Ebook Collection Printed on 11/17/2011 8.28 am via Manchester Metropolitan University, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Notes on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. Système de la mode. Seuil: Paris, 1967.
Batchen, Geoffrey (ed). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. A Small History of Photography. In idem, One Way Street and Other Writings. London: NLB, 1979.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258, 1917.
Fried, Michael. Barthes’s punctum. Critical Inquiry, Spring 2005 v3 i3 p539(36), University of Chicago Press. 2005.
Jay, Martin. The Camera as Memento Mori: Barthes, Metz, and the Cahiers du Cinéma. In Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Jenkins, Keith. Re-thinking History. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991.
Myers, Kathy. Towards a feminist erotica, In Looking On: Images of Femininity in the
Visual Arts and Media. ed. Rosemary Betterton, Pandora, London and New York, 1987. pp. 189–202.
Prosser, Jay. Roland Barthes’s Loss. In Light in the Dark Room, Photography and Loss. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Waugh, Patricia. Adorno_and_the_Frankfurt_School. In Literary Theory & Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Appendix
Figure one.
Roland Barthes with students from his 1974 Seminar at the École des Hautes Études, (photographer unknown).