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Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.
119 pages, Paperback
First published February 21, 1980
About the author
Roland Barthes
372 books2,261 followersRoland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
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February 20, 2022
La Chambre Caire: Note sur la photographie = Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «اتاق روشن: تامالاتی درباره عکاسی»؛ «اتاق روشن: اندیشه هایی درباره ی عکاسی»؛ نویسنده رولان بارت؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش و نگرش ماه اکتبر سال2001میلادی
عنوان: اتاق روشن: تامالاتی درباره عکاسی؛ نویسنده: رولان بارت؛ مترجم فرشید آدرنگ؛ تهران، ماه ریز، سال1379؛ در175ص، مصور؛ شابک9647049404؛ موضوع عکاسی هنری از نویسندگان فرانسه؛ - سده20م
عنوان: اتاق روشن: اندیشه هایی درباره ی عکاسی؛ نویسنه: رولان بارت؛ مترجم: نیلوفر معترف؛ تهران، چشمه، سال1380؛ در144ص، مصور؛ شابک9643620077؛
رولان بارت، در پس علاقه اش به عکس و عکاسی، اندیشه های خویش را، در کتاب «اتاق روشن»، به رشته ی نگارش درآورده اند؛ این کتاب دارای دو بخش جداگانه است؛ در بخش آغازین، «بارت» کوشش دارد: ویژگی‌های عکاسی را به زبانی ساده بیان، و تعیین هرگونه رده بندی، برای این هنر را، نفی می‌کنند، و در جستجوی خاستگاه این نظم ناپذیری هستند؛ در بخش دوم «رولان بارت»، در پی این هستند که: به خویشتن خویش، رجوع کنند؛ به همانجایی که سرچشمه ی دریافت‌های ایشان از عکسهای متفاوت است؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 08/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 30/11/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Camera Lucida is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «اتاق روشن: تامالاتی درباره عکاسی»؛ «اتاق روشن: اندیشه هایی درباره ی عکاسی»؛ نویسنده رولان بارت؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش و نگرش ماه اکتبر سال2001میلادی
عنوان: اتاق روشن: تامالاتی درباره عکاسی؛ نویسنده: رولان بارت؛ مترجم فرشید آدرنگ؛ تهران، ماه ریز، سال1379؛ در175ص، مصور؛ شابک9647049404؛ موضوع عکاسی هنری از نویسندگان فرانسه؛ - سده20م
عنوان: اتاق روشن: اندیشه هایی درباره ی عکاسی؛ نویسنه: رولان بارت؛ مترجم: نیلوفر معترف؛ تهران، چشمه، سال1380؛ در144ص، مصور؛ شابک9643620077؛
رولان بارت، در پس علاقه اش به عکس و عکاسی، اندیشه های خویش را، در کتاب «اتاق روشن»، به رشته ی نگارش درآورده اند؛ این کتاب دارای دو بخش جداگانه است؛ در بخش آغازین، «بارت» کوشش دارد: ویژگی‌های عکاسی را به زبانی ساده بیان، و تعیین هرگونه رده بندی، برای این هنر را، نفی می‌کنند، و در جستجوی خاستگاه این نظم ناپذیری هستند؛ در بخش دوم «رولان بارت»، در پی این هستند که: به خویشتن خویش، رجوع کنند؛ به همانجایی که سرچشمه ی دریافت‌های ایشان از عکسهای متفاوت است؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 08/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 30/11/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
August 18, 2021
ما يرفع من شأن الصورة هو الحب .. الحب المفرط
________
رولان بارت الفيلسوف الفريد من نوعه
في غرفته المضيئة شديدة التميز
هنا سنرى الصورة تحت الأضواء الكاشفة
أضواء بارت .. وليس سواه
*******
هو "أنا " الذى لا يتطابق أبدا مع صورتى
لأن الصورة هي التي تبدو ثقيلة..ساكنة..عنيدة
وهو "أنا" الذى أبدو خفيفا منقسما مشتتا
لا أبقى ساكنا
بل مهتاجا في إنائي كعفريت العلبة
________
إنها مضات فكرية أدبية تأملية
ذاتية تماما
يتأمل بارت الصورة وما تشعله بداخله من دهشة
يغوص إلى عالم أبعد من مكان الصورة من التاريخ
باحثا عن جوهرها
وعن مغزاها في نفسه
*******
قد يحدث أن أكون مُراقبا دون أن أدري
ولكني في أحيان كثيرة وبمشيئتي يتم تصويري على دراية مني
بيد أني متى أشعر أنني مُراقَب من قبل العدسة، حتى يتغير كلّ شيء
أتشكّل منشغلا باتخاذ وضعا أمام الكاميرا ، أصنع لنفسي في الحال جسدا آخر
أتحول سلفا إلى صورة، وأشعر أن الصورة توجِد جسدي وتُميته، وفقا إرادتها الخاصة.
________
على مدار الكتاب نجد مصطلحات جديدة اخترعها بارت
ما يؤكد مجدد على ذاتية الكتاب والكاتب
مثل "البوكنتوم" والذي يطلقه على التفصيلة المعينة في الصورة التي تثير في نفسه شعورا معينا
يحثه على تحليل الصورة الفوتوغرافية الماثلة أمامه
"أو بداخله لو تحرينا الدقة"
*******
ولكن ما أريده أن يدرك هو النسيج المعنوي الرقيق، وليست المحاكاة
فأنا لا أعرف كيف أجسد ما يجيش في نفسي
أقرر أن أدع ابتسامة خفيفة تطفو على شفتي وفي عيني أريد لها أن تكون غامضة
بحيث أعبر في آن واحد عن خصائص طبيعتي ودرايتي الساخرة بكل طقوس الفوتوغرافيا
________
يرى رولان بارت أن الفوتوغرافيا أقرب للمسرح
لا للرسم
والرابط بين المسرح والصورة الفوتوغرافية هو الموت في نظره، حيث يرى الفوتوغرافيا
متصلة بفكرة البعث ...
تبقى الصورة حية إلى الأبد
من المقاطع التي لفتت نظري صورة لشاب ينتظر إعدامه شنقا وتعليق بارت عليها
::
سوف يموت، هكذا أقرأ في نفس الوقت: هذا ما سوف يكون وهذا ما كان
ألاحظ برعب مستقبل سابق حيث الموت هو الرهان، بإعطائي الماضي المطلق للوضع المبهم
تروي لي الصورة عن الموت في المستقبل
ما يؤلمني هو اكتشافي لهذا التكافؤ، أمام صورة أمي وهي طفلة
قلت لنفسي: سوف تموت، ارتعدت مثل المريض العقلي من الفاجعة التي حدثت بالفعل
سواء كان الشخص في الصورة مات بالفعل أم لا، كل صورة هي تلك الفاجعة
...
أختتم بهذا الاقتباس الفريد
لرؤية زجاجة مصورة .. فرع سوسنة .. دجاجة أو قصر
لا يلزم إلا الواقع، ولكن أن ترى جسدا، وجها، ولا سيما إذا كان في الغالب لشخص محبوب؟
فبما أن الفوتوغرافيا (في جوهرها) توثق وجود شخص ما، فأريد أن أعثر عليه بالكامل
أعني أستعيده في جوهره "مثلما هو في ذاته"، أبعد من مجرد الشبه، هنا تصبح سطحية الصورة أكثر إيلاما
لأنه ليس بمقدورها أن تستجيب لرغبتي الحمقاء إلا بشيء لا يوصف
جلاء الصورة هو قانونها ومع ذلك يكون بعيد الاحتمال، لا أستطيع إثباته
هذا الشيء هو "السيماء"
August 9, 2017
در بیست و پنج فوریه سال هزار و نهصد و هشتاد، ضیافت ناهار به دعوت جک لانگ، وزیر فرهنگ فرانسه در پاریس برگزار شده بود. این ضیافت، در واقع کمپینی برای حمایت از حزب سوسیالیست فرانسه برای شرکت در انتخابات سال پیش‌رو بود که تعداد زیادی از نویسندگان و روشنفکران مطرح فرانسوی از جمله رولان بارت در آن حضور داشتند.
بعد از پایان مراسم، در حدود ساعت پنج عصر، بارت که درصدد عبور از خیابان بود، ابتدا به سمت چپ و با اندکی مکث به سمت راست خیابان نگاه کرد، هر چند این درنگ، مانع از آن نشد که رولان بارت نتواند خودرو ون را ببیند و لحظه‌ای بعد، با بینی شکسته و خون‌آلود روی خیابان افتاد. ساعاتی بعد ناشر آثار بارت اعلام کرد که او در وضعیت پایدار و مناسبی قرار دارد و جایی برای نگرانی نیست.
بارت در دوماهِ منتهی به این تصادف، به تکمیل نوشته‌هایش پرداخته بود و البته به دلیل انتقادات زیادی که از تازه‌ترین اثرش "اتاق روشن" شده بود در حالتی از خشم و ناامیدی به سر می‌برد. این تازه‌ترین اثر که البته آخرین کتاب بارت بود، یک اثر نسبتا اعتراضی هم بود، زیرا چیزی که بارت در این کتاب نوشته بود نه یک بحث تئوریکِ صرف و نه یک اثر آوانگاردِ پست‌مدرن بود و نه حتی به تاریخچه یا جامعه‌شناسیِ عکاسی می‌پرداخت. در عوض این اثر یک اثر شخصی و شاید سانتی‌مانتال و احساسی بود که از چهل و هشت قطعه غم‌انگیز تشکیل شده بود.
هرچند رویکرد سوبژکتیو بارت، سالها قبل با چاپ کتاب "رولان بارت به روایت رولان بارت" در نوشته‌ها و اندیشه‌های وی قابل رویت بود، با این حال، اتاق روشن تا حدود زیادی از این رویکرد سوبژکتیو فاصله داشت. در واقع در این اثر نشان زیادی از رویکرد ساختارگرایانه و نشانه‌شناسی بارت هم به چشم نمی‌خورد. بلکه کتاب، آمیزه‌ای از اندوه و عشق و غم بود که رولان بارت آن را در یادبود مادرش که به تازگی از دنیا رفته بود نوشته بود.
اتاق روشن یک اثر عجیب و غریب و خارق‌العاده است در در طی چهل سال از اولین چاپش توانسته به اثری مرکزی در حوزه مطالعات عکاسی بدل شود. هیچ کتابی در این زمینه، به اندازه اتاق روشن اثرگذار و نافذ نبوده است. اما ماهیت این تاثیرگذاری در چیست؟ چه چیزی از خواندن اتاق روشن یاد می‌گیریم؟ کتاب یقینا بحث جامعی در باب عکاسی ارائه نمیدهد. بارت هیچ علاقه‌ای به تکنیک‌های عکاسی ندارد و حتی خود را عکاس آماتور هم در نظر نمی‌گیرد. حتی آن‌گونه که هنر پست‌مدرن در پی آن است، بارت به رنگ‌ها و زوایای تابش نور هیچ توجهی نمی‌کند. او این وظیفه را به جامعه‌شناسی محول میکند و در جمله‌ای سخت کنایی اینچنین میگوید که "برای خوب دیدن عکس باید از آن رو بگردانی یا چشمان خود را بر آن ببندی."
پس بارت وقتی به عکس نگاه میکند در جستجوی چیست؟ او از دو مفهوم اساسی در هر عکس سخن میگوید. مفهوم اول استودیوم است. یعنی زمینه عکس که شامل هر چیز تاریخی، فرهنگی و هنری در عکس میشود. مفهوم دوم آن زخمی است که عکس به بیننده می‌زند و بارت آن را پونکتیوم می‌نامد. این همان عنصری در عکس است که ما را جذب یک عکس میکند. و بارت میگوید که بیشتر عکسها، فاقد عنصر پونکتیوم هستند.
بارت نوشتن کتاب را پس از از دست دادن مادرش که بیشتر زندگی خود را با او سپری کرده بود آغاز کرد. او به دنبال مادر خود در میان عکسهای قدیمی بود و در نهایت از میان مجموعه‌ای از عکسها موفق شد عکس درست را پیدا کند. تصویر مادرش در سن پنج سال‌گی در زمانی که کودکی خردسال بود و در باغی زمستانی گرفته شده بود. به تعبیری پروست‌وار، این عکس یادبودی از مادرش در لحظه‌ای از زمان گذشته بود. از آنجایی که بارت راوی هوشمندی است، این عکس را به ما نشان نمیدهد "این فقط برای من وجود دارد، برای شما فقط یک عکس مثل دیگر عکس‌هاست."
اتاق روشن یک کتاب کوتاه است، که البته با عکس باغ زمستانی دوباره آغاز میشود. ناگهان هر عکس برای بارت به یک یادبود تبدیل میشود. او در تعبیری ترسناک چنین میگوید "هر عکاس کارگزار مرگ است." در واقع در هر عکس سکونی یافت میشود که نسبتی عمیق با مرگ پیدا میکند. او به عنوان مثال عکسی از یک جوان زیبای آمریکایی را نشان میدهد که به جرم تلاش برای ترور وزیر امور خارجه آمریکا، در زندان است و قرار است که ساعتی بعد اعدام شود. بارت در مورد این عکس میگوید در اینجا استودیوم، زیبایی چهره جوان است. اما پونکتیوم یا همان عنصر زخمی اثر، این است که جوان خواهد مرد. او مرده است. بارت این پارادوکس زمانی را هراسناک می‌یابد. کتاب او از این جا به بعد، صدایی شگفت‌انگیز میدهد. بارت با تصاویری اندوه بار محاصره شده است. تصاویری که از راههایی بسیار، سکونی به سمت مرگ را آغاز می‌کنند.
اما درنهایت اتاق روشن چگونه بر مخاطب اثر می‌گذارد؟ نفوذ این کتاب بر مخاطب قطعا مربوط به پیوند عکاسی با مرگ است. کتاب از اندوه و سکون و مرگ یاد میکند و هر عکسی که زخم می‌زند نسبتی با همدردی پیدا میکند. همدردی، همان حالتی است که نیچه را پس از مشاهده رنج یک اسب، به جنون رهنمون میشود.
بارت، حدود یک ماه پس از این تصادف، زندگی خود را از دست داد. او که به دلیل فشار خون بالا در بیمار��تان بستری شده بود در جمع دانشجویان خود، صحبتی کوتاه داشت و پس از آن وضعیت جسمی او رو به وخامت گذاشت و ساعاتی بعد از دنیا رفت. آخرین دستنوشته او روی میز کارش، مقاله‌ای در باره استاندال بود تحت این عنوان که "یکی همیشه نمی‌تواند از آنهایی که عاشق‌شان بوده حرف بزند."
کتاب را با ترجمه‌ی زیبای خانم نیلوفر معترف خواندم. سپاس از تلاش ایشان.
بعد از پایان مراسم، در حدود ساعت پنج عصر، بارت که درصدد عبور از خیابان بود، ابتدا به سمت چپ و با اندکی مکث به سمت راست خیابان نگاه کرد، هر چند این درنگ، مانع از آن نشد که رولان بارت نتواند خودرو ون را ببیند و لحظه‌ای بعد، با بینی شکسته و خون‌آلود روی خیابان افتاد. ساعاتی بعد ناشر آثار بارت اعلام کرد که او در وضعیت پایدار و مناسبی قرار دارد و جایی برای نگرانی نیست.
بارت در دوماهِ منتهی به این تصادف، به تکمیل نوشته‌هایش پرداخته بود و البته به دلیل انتقادات زیادی که از تازه‌ترین اثرش "اتاق روشن" شده بود در حالتی از خشم و ناامیدی به سر می‌برد. این تازه‌ترین اثر که البته آخرین کتاب بارت بود، یک اثر نسبتا اعتراضی هم بود، زیرا چیزی که بارت در این کتاب نوشته بود نه یک بحث تئوریکِ صرف و نه یک اثر آوانگاردِ پست‌مدرن بود و نه حتی به تاریخچه یا جامعه‌شناسیِ عکاسی می‌پرداخت. در عوض این اثر یک اثر شخصی و شاید سانتی‌مانتال و احساسی بود که از چهل و هشت قطعه غم‌انگیز تشکیل شده بود.
هرچند رویکرد سوبژکتیو بارت، سالها قبل با چاپ کتاب "رولان بارت به روایت رولان بارت" در نوشته‌ها و اندیشه‌های وی قابل رویت بود، با این حال، اتاق روشن تا حدود زیادی از این رویکرد سوبژکتیو فاصله داشت. در واقع در این اثر نشان زیادی از رویکرد ساختارگرایانه و نشانه‌شناسی بارت هم به چشم نمی‌خورد. بلکه کتاب، آمیزه‌ای از اندوه و عشق و غم بود که رولان بارت آن را در یادبود مادرش که به تازگی از دنیا رفته بود نوشته بود.
اتاق روشن یک اثر عجیب و غریب و خارق‌العاده است در در طی چهل سال از اولین چاپش توانسته به اثری مرکزی در حوزه مطالعات عکاسی بدل شود. هیچ کتابی در این زمینه، به اندازه اتاق روشن اثرگذار و نافذ نبوده است. اما ماهیت این تاثیرگذاری در چیست؟ چه چیزی از خواندن اتاق روشن یاد می‌گیریم؟ کتاب یقینا بحث جامعی در باب عکاسی ارائه نمیدهد. بارت هیچ علاقه‌ای به تکنیک‌های عکاسی ندارد و حتی خود را عکاس آماتور هم در نظر نمی‌گیرد. حتی آن‌گونه که هنر پست‌مدرن در پی آن است، بارت به رنگ‌ها و زوایای تابش نور هیچ توجهی نمی‌کند. او این وظیفه را به جامعه‌شناسی محول میکند و در جمله‌ای سخت کنایی اینچنین میگوید که "برای خوب دیدن عکس باید از آن رو بگردانی یا چشمان خود را بر آن ببندی."
پس بارت وقتی به عکس نگاه میکند در جستجوی چیست؟ او از دو مفهوم اساسی در هر عکس سخن میگوید. مفهوم اول استودیوم است. یعنی زمینه عکس که شامل هر چیز تاریخی، فرهنگی و هنری در عکس میشود. مفهوم دوم آن زخمی است که عکس به بیننده می‌زند و بارت آن را پونکتیوم می‌نامد. این همان عنصری در عکس است که ما را جذب یک عکس میکند. و بارت میگوید که بیشتر عکسها، فاقد عنصر پونکتیوم هستند.
بارت نوشتن کتاب را پس از از دست دادن مادرش که بیشتر زندگی خود را با او سپری کرده بود آغاز کرد. او به دنبال مادر خود در میان عکسهای قدیمی بود و در نهایت از میان مجموعه‌ای از عکسها موفق شد عکس درست را پیدا کند. تصویر مادرش در سن پنج سال‌گی در زمانی که کودکی خردسال بود و در باغی زمستانی گرفته شده بود. به تعبیری پروست‌وار، این عکس یادبودی از مادرش در لحظه‌ای از زمان گذشته بود. از آنجایی که بارت راوی هوشمندی است، این عکس را به ما نشان نمیدهد "این فقط برای من وجود دارد، برای شما فقط یک عکس مثل دیگر عکس‌هاست."
اتاق روشن یک کتاب کوتاه است، که البته با عکس باغ زمستانی دوباره آغاز میشود. ناگهان هر عکس برای بارت به یک یادبود تبدیل میشود. او در تعبیری ترسناک چنین میگوید "هر عکاس کارگزار مرگ است." در واقع در هر عکس سکونی یافت میشود که نسبتی عمیق با مرگ پیدا میکند. او به عنوان مثال عکسی از یک جوان زیبای آمریکایی را نشان میدهد که به جرم تلاش برای ترور وزیر امور خارجه آمریکا، در زندان است و قرار است که ساعتی بعد اعدام شود. بارت در مورد این عکس میگوید در اینجا استودیوم، زیبایی چهره جوان است. اما پونکتیوم یا همان عنصر زخمی اثر، این است که جوان خواهد مرد. او مرده است. بارت این پارادوکس زمانی را هراسناک می‌یابد. کتاب او از این جا به بعد، صدایی شگفت‌انگیز میدهد. بارت با تصاویری اندوه بار محاصره شده است. تصاویری که از راههایی بسیار، سکونی به سمت مرگ را آغاز می‌کنند.
اما درنهایت اتاق روشن چگونه بر مخاطب اثر می‌گذارد؟ نفوذ این کتاب بر مخاطب قطعا مربوط به پیوند عکاسی با مرگ است. کتاب از اندوه و سکون و مرگ یاد میکند و هر عکسی که زخم می‌زند نسبتی با همدردی پیدا میکند. همدردی، همان حالتی است که نیچه را پس از مشاهده رنج یک اسب، به جنون رهنمون میشود.
بارت، حدود یک ماه پس از این تصادف، زندگی خود را از دست داد. او که به دلیل فشار خون بالا در بیمار��تان بستری شده بود در جمع دانشجویان خود، صحبتی کوتاه داشت و پس از آن وضعیت جسمی او رو به وخامت گذاشت و ساعاتی بعد از دنیا رفت. آخرین دستنوشته او روی میز کارش، مقاله‌ای در باره استاندال بود تحت این عنوان که "یکی همیشه نمی‌تواند از آنهایی که عاشق‌شان بوده حرف بزند."
کتاب را با ترجمه‌ی زیبای خانم نیلوفر معترف خواندم. سپاس از تلاش ایشان.
June 14, 2023
In Camera Lucida, literary theorist, philosopher, and linguist Roland Barthes attempts to find the essence of photography and how photography affects him as the spectator of photographs. It also serves as a poignant eulogy to his mother, who passed away in 1977, and he shows a grieving pain that is reflected throughout Camera Lucida. Barthes himself lost his life three years later, after being knocked down by a van whilst walking to his Parisian home.
Barthes approaches his analysis of photography in two parts - he first focuses on defining a structuralist approach to finding the essence of photography before he evaluates the photographic referent, and how photography is somehow representative of death - the 'past reality'. He even describes photographers as agents of death, and whilst looking for his mother in old photos he always reminds the reader that this essay carries with it a more personal evaluation.
In short - it is a book about photography, but one linked with the subjects of love and grief.
Although Camera Lucida is seen as a highly influential book on the subject. it's overall nature remains somewhat obscure, just what exactly does one learn from reading it? Barthes certainly shrinks from being comprehensive, with no interest in the actual techniques of photography, in arguments over its status as art, nor really in its role in contemporary media or culture.
What, then, was Barthes looking for when he studied certain photographs? he goes about elaborating a distinction between two planes of the image. The first, which he calls the studium, is the manifest subject, meaning and context of the photograph: everything that belongs to history,
culture, and even to art. The second he calls the punctum: that aspect, often a small detail, of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty.
For all his dense philosophizing, he does embrace the subject matter with much heartache, making Camera Lucida a deeply moving read. The old photographs that are appear every so often, gives the sense that for Barthes its like a memorial, the very essence of the medium is its spectral conjuring of death-in-life. In fiction, the late WG Sebald owed a profound debt to Camera Lucida; in Austerlitz, the protagonist's search for an image of his lost mother is clearly modelled on Barthes's desire for a glimpse of 'the unique being'.
Ultimately, Camera Lucida is not the definitive reappraisal of photography that was probably expected by many a reader. It doesn't reveal itself to be the long-sought grammar of photographs. It is though intimate and soul-stirring, not just academic and theoretical, as Barthes bites into photography like Proust into a madeleine, and the result is an intricate, quirky, and affecting meditation, fusing together photography and death.
July 28, 2023
Thanks to Roland Barthes!
He made me understand what photography is in its natural dimension, beyond technique. It is a state of mind. The device only extends the eye. The important thing is to learn to SEE before handling the lens, affirm a REGARD that arises on the mundane things of life, and feel a framing that questions! Dig a surprising subject! Watch intelligence and build a deep, self-evident image. The unique one!
Instinct turns out to be a visual set-top box, creativity a sensor of every moment, living a natural photographic trance! The "film" or digital photo? It's constant apnea for all the senses.
He made me understand what photography is in its natural dimension, beyond technique. It is a state of mind. The device only extends the eye. The important thing is to learn to SEE before handling the lens, affirm a REGARD that arises on the mundane things of life, and feel a framing that questions! Dig a surprising subject! Watch intelligence and build a deep, self-evident image. The unique one!
Instinct turns out to be a visual set-top box, creativity a sensor of every moment, living a natural photographic trance! The "film" or digital photo? It's constant apnea for all the senses.
August 21, 2013
For Barthes, every photograph, rather than being a representation, is an expression of loss. The photograph, like all art which precedes it, attempts to eternalize its subject, to imbue it with life-forever, to blend the beautiful with the infinite; but it fails, it reminds us only of mortality (death is the mother of beauty). Try though it may, and despite its resemblance to life, the photo can never extend a life which is lost, or a life which is passing.
I think of the vain art of aesthetic preservation at the end of Lolita: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Humbert has failed to give his Lolita immortality, she is dead and gone from him forever, even when her life remains throbbing in her veins, Humbert's Lolita is dead to him, passed, and that is the effect of photography: a vain snatch at passing beauty. For Barthes, the photograph is irrevocably the servant of Time, the momentary click of the photographic instrument is the shuddering tick of time, as the photograph-frozen object dies away - the object that-has-been (ça-a-été) dies away every indivisible moment and is born over in what-is-now. Barthesian Time, for the photograph, is instant death. What has been photographed can never occur exactly the same way, for that momentary coincidence is past, but in the photograph it is falsely repeated infinitely. Every photograph is an epitaph.
For Walter Benjamin too, as with his successor Barthes, the clicking-photo and the ticking-time are inseparable melodies of the same fugue. He tells us: "...image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical..." The image exists extemporally, but it is helplessly pinioned to the edifice of time. Every momentary photo has a following moment which is unphotographed, and another and another through infinite moments until Now. From the singular snap of the camera, there is an infinity of moments, a constant constellation across time, bridging the distance between what-is and what-was. And as Barthes notes, that distance is immeasurable, it is infinite: you can never retrieve, never relive, that which has passed, that which is gone, that which is dead. The shock, the punctum of a photo, is a "posthumous shock" as indentified by Benjamin:
Throughout, Barthes provides us with a number of photographs which touch, or fail to touch, him. No matter the photographic subject: political, journalistic, personal, professional or amateur: Barthes approaches each with a reverence and solemnity, like a man walking through a cemetery: head downcast, hands intertwined, heart in his throat. Despite the many provided photographic examples, the photo which moves Barthes, and which most moves the reader, is not included, and it exists to us only in Barthes' words: the photo of his mother as a child. This photograph belongs to a history which excludes him, which is totally unfamiliar to his image-repertoire because it is outside of Time as he knows it. This image is a private history, but a privacy which is removed from his own, irremediably by time and space. And he sees in her image that-which-was and simultaneously that which has died and that which is going to die. The girl in the photo is gone, but the woman she has become has a limited mortality of her own, and the photo is a death-knell calling her to the grave, calling her back to the history which she has left behind her.
Calvino warns us that "memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased" and that is the operation of photography: to erase memory, to anesthetize it, kill it. The photograph is a conscious attempt to remember, but it cozens us, it tricks us, and it makes us forget. I defer again to Benjamin, in his essay on memory in Proust:
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 think of the vain art of aesthetic preservation at the end of Lolita: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Humbert has failed to give his Lolita immortality, she is dead and gone from him forever, even when her life remains throbbing in her veins, Humbert's Lolita is dead to him, passed, and that is the effect of photography: a vain snatch at passing beauty. For Barthes, the photograph is irrevocably the servant of Time, the momentary click of the photographic instrument is the shuddering tick of time, as the photograph-frozen object dies away - the object that-has-been (ça-a-été) dies away every indivisible moment and is born over in what-is-now. Barthesian Time, for the photograph, is instant death. What has been photographed can never occur exactly the same way, for that momentary coincidence is past, but in the photograph it is falsely repeated infinitely. Every photograph is an epitaph.
For Walter Benjamin too, as with his successor Barthes, the clicking-photo and the ticking-time are inseparable melodies of the same fugue. He tells us: "...image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical..." The image exists extemporally, but it is helplessly pinioned to the edifice of time. Every momentary photo has a following moment which is unphotographed, and another and another through infinite moments until Now. From the singular snap of the camera, there is an infinity of moments, a constant constellation across time, bridging the distance between what-is and what-was. And as Barthes notes, that distance is immeasurable, it is infinite: you can never retrieve, never relive, that which has passed, that which is gone, that which is dead. The shock, the punctum of a photo, is a "posthumous shock" as indentified by Benjamin:
Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the 'snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.
Throughout, Barthes provides us with a number of photographs which touch, or fail to touch, him. No matter the photographic subject: political, journalistic, personal, professional or amateur: Barthes approaches each with a reverence and solemnity, like a man walking through a cemetery: head downcast, hands intertwined, heart in his throat. Despite the many provided photographic examples, the photo which moves Barthes, and which most moves the reader, is not included, and it exists to us only in Barthes' words: the photo of his mother as a child. This photograph belongs to a history which excludes him, which is totally unfamiliar to his image-repertoire because it is outside of Time as he knows it. This image is a private history, but a privacy which is removed from his own, irremediably by time and space. And he sees in her image that-which-was and simultaneously that which has died and that which is going to die. The girl in the photo is gone, but the woman she has become has a limited mortality of her own, and the photo is a death-knell calling her to the grave, calling her back to the history which she has left behind her.
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.Every photo is a commingling of love and death, a realm of life lost and life left for losing. There is a beauty in life which is lost when it pinned down in art, art of any kind, but especially Photography. While literature, painting, drawing, music, all take life and attempt to pin it down, they also add something that life hadn't had before. In photography, nothing is added, it is frozen life, it is death, there is nothing which supports it, nothing which adorn it, we see nothing added, we are only reminded of what has been removed.
When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
Calvino warns us that "memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased" and that is the operation of photography: to erase memory, to anesthetize it, kill it. The photograph is a conscious attempt to remember, but it cozens us, it tricks us, and it makes us forget. I defer again to Benjamin, in his essay on memory in Proust:
When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.Our purposive remembering, our memories which we force-fit into words, into images, die - they are no longer what they were, they have been forced to change mediums, and something is lost: the beauty of life. The photograph only appears a representation of reality, it is only, rather, an expression of loss, of what can never be again. It is often in art that the afflatus of creation is to exorcise, to kill away, that which burns inside the artist, to cleanse the spirit of the past. But there is a danger in this, in the abundance of photography, that our memories will become extinct.
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.Photographs, unlike other arts, are too immediate, seem too real (though they are unreal): the kill memory forever. Photographs do not shut the eyes, but gouge them out: we become Oedipus fleeing reality as it is, in a vain blindness which forces us to remember only what we hoped to lose, and lose only what we hoped to remember.
Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no on 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”): a mad image, chafed by reality.
May 16, 2020
A free-floating essay in two parts, each examining the essence of photography through the lens of the writer’s relationship with his late mother. In contrast to Sontag’s On Photography, this is relaxed, conversational, and personal, more concerned with exploring what makes photographs so compelling than building a complex argument about the history and ethics of photography. The work’s witty and sharp, and invites rereading.
November 8, 2021
What has always terrified me about photography is, as Barthes puts it (since I never could, not before this book anyway,) the infinite reproduction of a singular event. Evanescent instances that would have normally escaped my own memories, are now confined within a frame. A part of my existence that eludes my comprehension is now externalised, solidified and made to appear more real than the event itself was. In this sense, the etymology behind 'capturing' moments in photographs interests me a lot. 'Capturing' is always an act against a will.
'The look, the see, the here it is' that Barthes talks about only ever makes me scrutinize a photograph and then avert my gaze - sometimes in embarassment and sometimes in terror. Because Here It Is. Is it? If so, what is the true nature of the essence captured by the photograph that insists on being looked at, that marks its presence? The appearance does not coincide with the essence, no. It goes even deeper, into those niches of my consciousness that essence could never reach. 'I' is reduced to a reference.
I avert my gaze, close my eyes and walk away, only to know myself better and to feel that I am hollow. All of the world's photographs form a labyrinth, all of the photographs I view form a labyrinth of echo-less chambers that converge at me.
So yes, with each photograph captured I experience a micro version of death. It is exhilarating and numbing all at once.
'The look, the see, the here it is' that Barthes talks about only ever makes me scrutinize a photograph and then avert my gaze - sometimes in embarassment and sometimes in terror. Because Here It Is. Is it? If so, what is the true nature of the essence captured by the photograph that insists on being looked at, that marks its presence? The appearance does not coincide with the essence, no. It goes even deeper, into those niches of my consciousness that essence could never reach. 'I' is reduced to a reference.
I avert my gaze, close my eyes and walk away, only to know myself better and to feel that I am hollow. All of the world's photographs form a labyrinth, all of the photographs I view form a labyrinth of echo-less chambers that converge at me.
So yes, with each photograph captured I experience a micro version of death. It is exhilarating and numbing all at once.
May 8, 2016
This was the last book written by the renowned French master of linguistic semiotics and literary criticism before he died in 1980. It is a short (120 page) exploration of the unique qualities of photography compared to other forms of representation. The book was a rewarding book for me to think about photography in unfamiliar ways. I ended up making friends with the paradoxical concept that photographs do their magic by authentically capturing “what has been” while at the same time demonstrating in a sense the death of their subject. Photographers often work hard to make their subject “lifelike”, yet with the snap of the shutter whatever was real is frozen in its moment, pinned immobile, and present becomes irrevocably past.
This was most poignant by his search among his family pictures for one of his dead mother that might evoke her presence for him (he lived with her his whole life). Time after time shots he found of her failed to do the trick:
I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography therefore compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. …
The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status—which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother … I dream about her, I do not dream her.
Finally, he finds a shot of his mother as a girl in the garden, which bears somehow in her eyes an assertion of innocence, as in “I do no harm”:
In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone …just an image, a just image.
Barthes never does share the picture of his mother (he valued his privacy too much). He does show a picture of the photographer Felix Nadar’s mother from 1890 that might have done the trick for that pioneer.
Personally, I tend to shoot only landscapes. But I can appreciate the power and impact of an evocative portrait. Arnold Newman is a favorite for capturing something of the accomplishment or character of a person. Among the 20 or so photos Barthes includes in the book is one by Richard Avedon, “Born a Slave”, which for him becomes “the essence of slavery laid bare” and illustrates how the concrete can stimulate larger meanings:
Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask. It is this word that Calvino correctly uses to designate what makes a face into the product of a society and of its history.
In his own empirical journey in looking at photos to discover something of the “essence” of Photography with a capital “P”, he finds a dynamic between generic meanings (which he often finds ”banal”) and a more idiosyncratic element. He came to appreciate a division between an “average affect” for a general field of cultural meaning associated with a photo, to which he applies the Latin word stadium, and a second element he terms punctum, “which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” For example, a 1920s portrait of a family of blacks in their Sunday best clothes speaks to him of various sociological aspects of moderate interest, but for some reason the high belt and Mary Jane shoes of one of the women arouses a special sympathy and tenderness in him. In another example a shot of a blind gypsy with a violin being led across a road by a small boy “punctures” Barthes through a background element, the texture of the road reminding him powerfully of all his own past experiences traveling through rural villages of Hungary and Romania.
For the most part Barthes coverage of photography is personal and accessible, not abstruse and academic. Because of the importance of individual emotional response to photographs, Barthes did not feel subjecting the art form to a formal analysis with his methods of phenomenology or dissection of its place in aesthetic philosophy would be fruitful. He puts you at ease by admitting naivete about theories of photography and steers you clear of high-flown discussions and criticism of photography as art. Thus, for me the book has the pleasing quality of exploration with me as a reader in hand, and it pays off with a sense of discovery rather than persuasion and erection of a new dogma. His writing style includes lots of parenthetical insertions that have the feel of hypertext. He also uses colons and semicolons in nearly every sentence, which carries a sense of a logical unfolding of ideas like Russian nesting dolls.
I was moved most when Bathes marvels at the world-changing novelty of photography when it was invented by Niepce in the 1820 and reaches for poetic metaphors. I leave you with some choice quotes:
The first photographs a man contemplated …must have seemed to him to resemble certain paintings …; he knew, however, he was nose-to-nose with a mutant (a Martian can resemble a man); his consciousness posited the object encountered outside any analogy, like the ectoplasm of “what-had-been”: neither image nor reality, a new being really: a reality one can no longer touch.
…
The Photograph … 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 indeed has been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.
…
It seems to me that in Latin “photograph” would be said “imago lucis opera expressa”; which is to say: image revealed, “extracted”, “mounted,” “expressed” (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light. And if Photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to myth, we should exult over the richness of the symbol: the loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver (monument and luxury); to which we might add the notion that this metal, like all metals of Alchemy, is alive.
This was most poignant by his search among his family pictures for one of his dead mother that might evoke her presence for him (he lived with her his whole life). Time after time shots he found of her failed to do the trick:
I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography therefore compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. …
The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status—which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother … I dream about her, I do not dream her.
Finally, he finds a shot of his mother as a girl in the garden, which bears somehow in her eyes an assertion of innocence, as in “I do no harm”:
In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone …just an image, a just image.
Barthes never does share the picture of his mother (he valued his privacy too much). He does show a picture of the photographer Felix Nadar’s mother from 1890 that might have done the trick for that pioneer.
Personally, I tend to shoot only landscapes. But I can appreciate the power and impact of an evocative portrait. Arnold Newman is a favorite for capturing something of the accomplishment or character of a person. Among the 20 or so photos Barthes includes in the book is one by Richard Avedon, “Born a Slave”, which for him becomes “the essence of slavery laid bare” and illustrates how the concrete can stimulate larger meanings:
Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask. It is this word that Calvino correctly uses to designate what makes a face into the product of a society and of its history.
In his own empirical journey in looking at photos to discover something of the “essence” of Photography with a capital “P”, he finds a dynamic between generic meanings (which he often finds ”banal”) and a more idiosyncratic element. He came to appreciate a division between an “average affect” for a general field of cultural meaning associated with a photo, to which he applies the Latin word stadium, and a second element he terms punctum, “which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” For example, a 1920s portrait of a family of blacks in their Sunday best clothes speaks to him of various sociological aspects of moderate interest, but for some reason the high belt and Mary Jane shoes of one of the women arouses a special sympathy and tenderness in him. In another example a shot of a blind gypsy with a violin being led across a road by a small boy “punctures” Barthes through a background element, the texture of the road reminding him powerfully of all his own past experiences traveling through rural villages of Hungary and Romania.
For the most part Barthes coverage of photography is personal and accessible, not abstruse and academic. Because of the importance of individual emotional response to photographs, Barthes did not feel subjecting the art form to a formal analysis with his methods of phenomenology or dissection of its place in aesthetic philosophy would be fruitful. He puts you at ease by admitting naivete about theories of photography and steers you clear of high-flown discussions and criticism of photography as art. Thus, for me the book has the pleasing quality of exploration with me as a reader in hand, and it pays off with a sense of discovery rather than persuasion and erection of a new dogma. His writing style includes lots of parenthetical insertions that have the feel of hypertext. He also uses colons and semicolons in nearly every sentence, which carries a sense of a logical unfolding of ideas like Russian nesting dolls.
I was moved most when Bathes marvels at the world-changing novelty of photography when it was invented by Niepce in the 1820 and reaches for poetic metaphors. I leave you with some choice quotes:
The first photographs a man contemplated …must have seemed to him to resemble certain paintings …; he knew, however, he was nose-to-nose with a mutant (a Martian can resemble a man); his consciousness posited the object encountered outside any analogy, like the ectoplasm of “what-had-been”: neither image nor reality, a new being really: a reality one can no longer touch.
…
The Photograph … 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 indeed has been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.
…
It seems to me that in Latin “photograph” would be said “imago lucis opera expressa”; which is to say: image revealed, “extracted”, “mounted,” “expressed” (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light. And if Photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to myth, we should exult over the richness of the symbol: the loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver (monument and luxury); to which we might add the notion that this metal, like all metals of Alchemy, is alive.
January 10, 2019
I'd never thought much about Barthes method until I read Sara Ahmed's book Queer Phenomenology in which she draws attention to the labour that enables Husserl to sit and think at his table; the work of childcare and table clearing performed, probably, by women. Ahmed has inspired me to ask what Barthes is doing here, and Barthes has helpfully told me; he is forthright; perhaps that is why I find his writing appealing; I am engaged by honesty and directness. He looks at photographs; he thinks about photographs, and he writes whatever occurs to him that seems worthy of sharing. Strange to think that this text, famous, influential as it is, has such a personal origin, that a single standpoint can be taken as universal. I was awake to this when I read Barthes' reflections on being photographed 'I play the social game... [preserve my] essence of individuality'. I felt the contrast with images of fashion models, who are anonymous matter, utile bodies. And female celebrities: their 'essence of individuality', for the public, is built through repetition, the ubiquity of their images eventually persuades us of their reality beyond the image. The more beautiful the woman is judged to be, I think, the less individual she is, the more anodyne her image, her expressionless face... He says, parenthetically, discontinuously 'it is my political right to be a subject that I must protect'. I want to follow this thought - but he drops the trail, leaves it to others (feminists?) to pick up and consider the costs, the consequences...
Barthes considers what constitutes his interest in, his feelings about photographs, and distinguishes two classes of effect (or affect) they produce - a 'slippery, irresponsible' sort of general interest produced by the image's relation to fields of knowledge, culture, experience, curiosity, which he calls studium, and a piercing, emotional jolt that he calls punctum, a kind of realisation that there is life beyond the frame, but more than this, maybe even 'Pity' because the photograph speaks always of death (but for other reasons, because Barthes chooses photographs like Richard Avedon's devastating photo of William Casby 'Born a Slave', and one of a Black family whose trappings of 'respectability' induce 'Pity' in Barthes because he reads, reductively, a hopeless aspiration to Whiteness. Race thus becomes a painful emotion felt and mediated by the White viewer - Barthes describes it variously as wound, madness, ecstasy - he remembers Nietszche's 'pity' for a horse.)
After reflecting at length on a photograph of his mother as a child, he reflects at length on photography's defining feature, the 'this-has-been' it offers that is incontrovertible. He predicts that the astonishment at this will vanish, and I think he is right, but for more reasons than he anticipates, because hasn't the cultural status or the location of the photograph changed with the advent of social media? In this context great numbers of people quite habitually make photographs, and while we perhaps still mainly look at photographs while alone, we do not do so in the same kind of privacy as Barthes speaks of, and we very often look at photographs that are not our own. Perhaps all this belongs to the sociological fluff that Barthes is not interested in (the assertion he makes that there are few books on photography is no longer true!), but it seems to me that updates are in order. The transition from private to public, the arrival of celebrity culture, that the photograph attended, have passed into new stages in the digital age. Nonetheless, I think Barthes makes an enduring point about the photograph as a document impinging on time, on the sense of time, as the photograph as measurement and memento mori. 'Death must be somewhere in a society', Barthes insists, and yes, I think it is still in our personal photographs, little piping voices telling us life is precious...
Barthes considers what constitutes his interest in, his feelings about photographs, and distinguishes two classes of effect (or affect) they produce - a 'slippery, irresponsible' sort of general interest produced by the image's relation to fields of knowledge, culture, experience, curiosity, which he calls studium, and a piercing, emotional jolt that he calls punctum, a kind of realisation that there is life beyond the frame, but more than this, maybe even 'Pity' because the photograph speaks always of death (but for other reasons, because Barthes chooses photographs like Richard Avedon's devastating photo of William Casby 'Born a Slave', and one of a Black family whose trappings of 'respectability' induce 'Pity' in Barthes because he reads, reductively, a hopeless aspiration to Whiteness. Race thus becomes a painful emotion felt and mediated by the White viewer - Barthes describes it variously as wound, madness, ecstasy - he remembers Nietszche's 'pity' for a horse.)
After reflecting at length on a photograph of his mother as a child, he reflects at length on photography's defining feature, the 'this-has-been' it offers that is incontrovertible. He predicts that the astonishment at this will vanish, and I think he is right, but for more reasons than he anticipates, because hasn't the cultural status or the location of the photograph changed with the advent of social media? In this context great numbers of people quite habitually make photographs, and while we perhaps still mainly look at photographs while alone, we do not do so in the same kind of privacy as Barthes speaks of, and we very often look at photographs that are not our own. Perhaps all this belongs to the sociological fluff that Barthes is not interested in (the assertion he makes that there are few books on photography is no longer true!), but it seems to me that updates are in order. The transition from private to public, the arrival of celebrity culture, that the photograph attended, have passed into new stages in the digital age. Nonetheless, I think Barthes makes an enduring point about the photograph as a document impinging on time, on the sense of time, as the photograph as measurement and memento mori. 'Death must be somewhere in a society', Barthes insists, and yes, I think it is still in our personal photographs, little piping voices telling us life is precious...
September 29, 2014
This is a curious little book, and it really is a little book – only 119 pages. It is curious because it is two books. The first is a kind of philosophical discussion on the nature of photography. He says many very interesting things here – interesting in a philosophical kind of way. He starts with the basics and works his way up from there. For example, he says we can have three relationships to photographs: we can take them (he doesn’t take them so he has virtually nothing to say about this), we can be in them (and this is interesting, as having our picture taken means to pose – so what is it that we are seeing when we see a photo of ourselves?) and finally we can look at photographs (even if we are a super model this is surely our most frequent experience of photography). This last relationship of us to the photograph is what most of both parts of this book is about.
Rather than summarising this book I’m going to talk about some of the things that stopped me while reading it, that is, the things that made me think and then where those thought took me.
Firstly, I have to say that I’m not sure I fully agree with him – it is hard to say because some of the things he says I didn’t quite follow and so my criticisms may just be due to my not reading him closely enough. He repeatedly says that there is a kind of banality to photography. A photograph shows what was there. There is a lovely bit where he says that a photograph is like Cassandra – the woman Apollo gave the gift of prophesy to, but when she still wouldn’t have him as her lover he twisted the gift so that no one would ever believe her prophesies. We know photographs speak the truth, but often we are dumbfounded by the truths they say – photographs are Cassandras with their gaze fixed on the past. I really like that image. How often have we seen a photograph of ourselves or of a loved one years after it was taken only to realise our memories are out of joint? That some sequence of events must be wrong? ‘How can she be wearing that necklace then?’
The problem I have with his view is that I don’t believe photographs are simply the slices of time he makes them out to be. He sees photographs as graveyards for light. Open the shutter and the light that is reflected from a surface (the apple in a bowl of fruit or the half-turned smile of a loved one) reacts (chemically or electrically) with the mechanism so as to effectively freeze that light in time. We literally have the power to stop time, we new gods. Images, as he says, are a kind of death – and in a sense photographs are always about death, even within the minute they are taken, they immediately become about ‘then’. There is a sense in which the truest thing that can be said about a photograph is ‘this is what was’. But this view is only partly true. Photography is also about selection – it is always a chosen truth. Photography is also about artifice – it is about adjustments to lighting and focus that manipulate the truth of the image. And today, with photoshop, it is hard to know what we are looking at when we look at a photograph.
I have never been to New York. My only knowledge of the city comes from books and photographs and motion film. Could it be that the city itself does not exist? That the Twin Towers collapsing was really a huge fabrication in an international scale version of the Truman Show? Probably not. But then, I’ve also seen photographs of nuclear and biological war facilities in Iraq, with their storage tanks and their reinforced concrete walls, and what was black and white before the war was somehow to become shades of grey after, so who is to say? It is not just that we get to choose what to point the camera toward that is an ideological decision, but how we go about reading photographs is also deeply ideological.
I quite like the idea of the USA being a hugely expensive version of the Truman Show – let’s face it, it does offer the most satisfactory explanation for Rick Perry I can come up with, so I think I’m going to just go with it.
Barthes says that photographs can’t really be categorised and that there is a kind of surface meaning to photos that he refers to as studium, as a kind of study. This is our cultural understanding of photographs, what we feel when we see an image of nuns walking behind a group of soldiers on patrol. He doesn’t say this, but it is almost our rational brain that processes these images. But then there is what he calls punctum. This is something about the image that stops us. An example might help. There is a photo here of a young boy and in the photo an adult is playfully pointing a pistol at this young boy’s head. But Barthes says when he sees this photograph all he really sees is the boy’s bad teeth. The studium is basically ‘staged’ – the punctum is a kind of truth that just is. The punctum stops us, but it is rarely the key ‘message’ of the photograph.
The second half of this book is about him considering photographs of his mother and is quite moving. Looking for a photograph that has a dual impact on him – one that makes him feel it shows his mother as she was and also brings her back to life again. Obviously, such photographs are rare. I think this is because we aren’t quite ourselves when we pose for a photograph. Such photographs are self-conscious and so can never be essentially us. But there is a lovely line I read somewhere – that great photographs are never taken, but are given. Given, that is, by the subject. As someone who has often been the subject of photographs, a particularly self-conscious subject too, I find I’m rarely happy with the images taken of me – or even of the ones I try to ‘give’. So few of them look anything like I think I look like. I believe this is because I mostly only see myself straight-on. When photos are not taken as direct mirror shots they stop looking like me – the me I generally see is the face-to-mirror angle me – no other. But then, our self-image has a lot in common with photographs – neither age well with time. I suspect the image we carry of ourselves in our heads is a kind of photo taken at about 20. Comparisons between this image the person in photos and mirrors and in other people’s appraisals of us never fails to surprise us (well, if we are lucky surprise is the right word).
I enjoyed this a lot. But the best of this was my confusion over this photo.
[image error]
I still find it hard to believe this guy lived in 1865 rather than 1965.
Oh, and his line that to understand great photographs you need to close your eyes really should be where this review ends.
Rather than summarising this book I’m going to talk about some of the things that stopped me while reading it, that is, the things that made me think and then where those thought took me.
Firstly, I have to say that I’m not sure I fully agree with him – it is hard to say because some of the things he says I didn’t quite follow and so my criticisms may just be due to my not reading him closely enough. He repeatedly says that there is a kind of banality to photography. A photograph shows what was there. There is a lovely bit where he says that a photograph is like Cassandra – the woman Apollo gave the gift of prophesy to, but when she still wouldn’t have him as her lover he twisted the gift so that no one would ever believe her prophesies. We know photographs speak the truth, but often we are dumbfounded by the truths they say – photographs are Cassandras with their gaze fixed on the past. I really like that image. How often have we seen a photograph of ourselves or of a loved one years after it was taken only to realise our memories are out of joint? That some sequence of events must be wrong? ‘How can she be wearing that necklace then?’
The problem I have with his view is that I don’t believe photographs are simply the slices of time he makes them out to be. He sees photographs as graveyards for light. Open the shutter and the light that is reflected from a surface (the apple in a bowl of fruit or the half-turned smile of a loved one) reacts (chemically or electrically) with the mechanism so as to effectively freeze that light in time. We literally have the power to stop time, we new gods. Images, as he says, are a kind of death – and in a sense photographs are always about death, even within the minute they are taken, they immediately become about ‘then’. There is a sense in which the truest thing that can be said about a photograph is ‘this is what was’. But this view is only partly true. Photography is also about selection – it is always a chosen truth. Photography is also about artifice – it is about adjustments to lighting and focus that manipulate the truth of the image. And today, with photoshop, it is hard to know what we are looking at when we look at a photograph.
I have never been to New York. My only knowledge of the city comes from books and photographs and motion film. Could it be that the city itself does not exist? That the Twin Towers collapsing was really a huge fabrication in an international scale version of the Truman Show? Probably not. But then, I’ve also seen photographs of nuclear and biological war facilities in Iraq, with their storage tanks and their reinforced concrete walls, and what was black and white before the war was somehow to become shades of grey after, so who is to say? It is not just that we get to choose what to point the camera toward that is an ideological decision, but how we go about reading photographs is also deeply ideological.
I quite like the idea of the USA being a hugely expensive version of the Truman Show – let’s face it, it does offer the most satisfactory explanation for Rick Perry I can come up with, so I think I’m going to just go with it.
Barthes says that photographs can’t really be categorised and that there is a kind of surface meaning to photos that he refers to as studium, as a kind of study. This is our cultural understanding of photographs, what we feel when we see an image of nuns walking behind a group of soldiers on patrol. He doesn’t say this, but it is almost our rational brain that processes these images. But then there is what he calls punctum. This is something about the image that stops us. An example might help. There is a photo here of a young boy and in the photo an adult is playfully pointing a pistol at this young boy’s head. But Barthes says when he sees this photograph all he really sees is the boy’s bad teeth. The studium is basically ‘staged’ – the punctum is a kind of truth that just is. The punctum stops us, but it is rarely the key ‘message’ of the photograph.
The second half of this book is about him considering photographs of his mother and is quite moving. Looking for a photograph that has a dual impact on him – one that makes him feel it shows his mother as she was and also brings her back to life again. Obviously, such photographs are rare. I think this is because we aren’t quite ourselves when we pose for a photograph. Such photographs are self-conscious and so can never be essentially us. But there is a lovely line I read somewhere – that great photographs are never taken, but are given. Given, that is, by the subject. As someone who has often been the subject of photographs, a particularly self-conscious subject too, I find I’m rarely happy with the images taken of me – or even of the ones I try to ‘give’. So few of them look anything like I think I look like. I believe this is because I mostly only see myself straight-on. When photos are not taken as direct mirror shots they stop looking like me – the me I generally see is the face-to-mirror angle me – no other. But then, our self-image has a lot in common with photographs – neither age well with time. I suspect the image we carry of ourselves in our heads is a kind of photo taken at about 20. Comparisons between this image the person in photos and mirrors and in other people’s appraisals of us never fails to surprise us (well, if we are lucky surprise is the right word).
I enjoyed this a lot. But the best of this was my confusion over this photo.
[image error]
I still find it hard to believe this guy lived in 1865 rather than 1965.
Oh, and his line that to understand great photographs you need to close your eyes really should be where this review ends.
October 30, 2019
. به خاطر خوب دیدن یک عکس ، بهترین کار این است که از آن روبرگردانی یا چشمانت را بر آن فروبندی .
" شرط لازم یک تصویر ، یک نظر است ." این را یانوش به کافکا گفت ، و کافکا لبخندی زد و پاسخ داد : ما از چیزها عکس می گیریم تا از فکرمان بیرون شان کنیم . داستان های من راهی بر بستن چشمانم هستند . عکس باید ساکت باشد . ( عکس هایی هستند رجز خوان ، که من هیچ دوست شان ندارم ) .
این مسئله نه به پنهان کاری ، بل به موسیقی برمی گردد . ذهنیت مطلق ، صرفا در یک حالت به دست آمدنی است ، در سعی به سکوت ، ( بستن دیدگان تان ، به سخن درآوردن تصویر در سکوت است ) . عکس مجذوبم می کند که من آن را از چرت و پرت های روزمره اش بیرون بکشانم : از " تکنیک " ، از " واقعیت " ، از " گزارش " ، از " هنر " ، و چیزهایی از این دست : هیچ نگفتن ، بستن دیدگانم ، واگذاشتن نکته ی جزئی به خیزشی در خود ، همنوا با شعور عاطفی .
.
.
" رولان بارت "
" شرط لازم یک تصویر ، یک نظر است ." این را یانوش به کافکا گفت ، و کافکا لبخندی زد و پاسخ داد : ما از چیزها عکس می گیریم تا از فکرمان بیرون شان کنیم . داستان های من راهی بر بستن چشمانم هستند . عکس باید ساکت باشد . ( عکس هایی هستند رجز خوان ، که من هیچ دوست شان ندارم ) .
این مسئله نه به پنهان کاری ، بل به موسیقی برمی گردد . ذهنیت مطلق ، صرفا در یک حالت به دست آمدنی است ، در سعی به سکوت ، ( بستن دیدگان تان ، به سخن درآوردن تصویر در سکوت است ) . عکس مجذوبم می کند که من آن را از چرت و پرت های روزمره اش بیرون بکشانم : از " تکنیک " ، از " واقعیت " ، از " گزارش " ، از " هنر " ، و چیزهایی از این دست : هیچ نگفتن ، بستن دیدگانم ، واگذاشتن نکته ی جزئی به خیزشی در خود ، همنوا با شعور عاطفی .
.
.
" رولان بارت "
February 15, 2019
"او مرده است و او قرار است بمیرد"
■در سوگ مادر■
یکی از عجیب ترین کتابهایی که خوندم و یکی از عجیب ترین نویسنده هایی که دیدم(خوندمش)
اتاق روشن رولان بارت در واقع مرثیه این نظریه پرداز برای فوت مادرش است که حاوی تئوری ها و نظراتش در باب عکاسی است.بارت به زیبایی هرچه تمام تر "عکس" را از دیدگاه خود و از زوایای روانشناسی و جامعه شناسی و تاریخی و بعضا فلسفی بررسی میکند.
در کتاب از دو مفهوم بسیار مهم اسم برده میشود.
۱.استودیوم
۲.پونکتوم
نحوه ی تشریح و توضیح عکسها توسط بارت بسیار منحصر بفرد هستش.
جایی در تعریف این دو لغت میگوید:
«استودیوم؛ به معنی تقاضای چیزی، میل به کسی و البته گونه‌ای سرسپاری کلی و پرشور و شوق، اما بدون هیچ حس تیز و خاصی است. به میانجی استودیوم است که من به بسیاری از عکسها علاقه‌مند می‌شوم، خواه آنها را به منزله‌ی شاهد و مدرک سیاسی دریافت کنم خواه از آنها به عنوان صحنه‌های جالب تاریخی لذت ببرم: زیرا مشارکت من با اندام‌ها، چهره‌ها، ژست‌ها، صحنه‌ها و کنش‌ها به واسطه‌ی فرهنگ (این معنای ضمنی در استودیوم وجود دارد) ممکن میشود.
عنصر دوم استودیوم را می‌شکند (یا می‌بُرد). این بار من نیستم که آن را می‌جویم (آن‌گونه که من میدان استودیوم را با آگاهی مطلقم محاصره میکنم)، بلکه خودِ آن عنصر است که از آن صحنه بیرون می‌آید، همچون تیری پرتاب میشود و در من فرو می‌رود. در زبان لاتین برای نامیدن این زخم، این فرورفتگی و این علامتی که توسط ابزاری تیز و برنده پدید آمده، واژه‌ای وجود دارد: این واژه بسیار مناسب کار من است زیرا هم مفهوم نقطه‌گذاری اشاره دارد و هم این که عکسهای مورد بحث من در حقیقت نقطه‌گذاری شده‌اند و گاهی حتا با این نقاط حساس، خال خال می‌شوند؛ دقیقاً این علامت‌ها و این زخم‌ها، نقاط بسیاری‌اند. بنابراین این عنصر دوم را که استودیوم را به هم می‌ریزد، پونکتوم می‌نامم؛ زیرا پونکتوم به معنی نیش، خال، بریدگی، سوراخ کوچک و نوعی تاس هم است.
پونکتوم یک عکس، حادثه‌ای است که در من فرو می‌رود و زخمی‌ام میکند، هم کبودم میکند و هم دردناک است».
نمیدانم دیدگاه عکاس ها و تئوریسین ها راجع به این کتاب چیست.ولی به عنوان یک آماتور و کسی که مشتاق عکاسی و سینما است میتوانم بگویم این کتاب دید مرا راجع به عکس به کلی عوض کرد و از این به بعد سعی میکنم از زوایای دیگری هم که رولان بارت تلویحا پیشنهاد میکند یک اثر را مشاهده کنم.
■در سوگ مادر■
یکی از عجیب ترین کتابهایی که خوندم و یکی از عجیب ترین نویسنده هایی که دیدم(خوندمش)
اتاق روشن رولان بارت در واقع مرثیه این نظریه پرداز برای فوت مادرش است که حاوی تئوری ها و نظراتش در باب عکاسی است.بارت به زیبایی هرچه تمام تر "عکس" را از دیدگاه خود و از زوایای روانشناسی و جامعه شناسی و تاریخی و بعضا فلسفی بررسی میکند.
در کتاب از دو مفهوم بسیار مهم اسم برده میشود.
۱.استودیوم
۲.پونکتوم
نحوه ی تشریح و توضیح عکسها توسط بارت بسیار منحصر بفرد هستش.
جایی در تعریف این دو لغت میگوید:
«استودیوم؛ به معنی تقاضای چیزی، میل به کسی و البته گونه‌ای سرسپاری کلی و پرشور و شوق، اما بدون هیچ حس تیز و خاصی است. به میانجی استودیوم است که من به بسیاری از عکسها علاقه‌مند می‌شوم، خواه آنها را به منزله‌ی شاهد و مدرک سیاسی دریافت کنم خواه از آنها به عنوان صحنه‌های جالب تاریخی لذت ببرم: زیرا مشارکت من با اندام‌ها، چهره‌ها، ژست‌ها، صحنه‌ها و کنش‌ها به واسطه‌ی فرهنگ (این معنای ضمنی در استودیوم وجود دارد) ممکن میشود.
عنصر دوم استودیوم را می‌شکند (یا می‌بُرد). این بار من نیستم که آن را می‌جویم (آن‌گونه که من میدان استودیوم را با آگاهی مطلقم محاصره میکنم)، بلکه خودِ آن عنصر است که از آن صحنه بیرون می‌آید، همچون تیری پرتاب میشود و در من فرو می‌رود. در زبان لاتین برای نامیدن این زخم، این فرورفتگی و این علامتی که توسط ابزاری تیز و برنده پدید آمده، واژه‌ای وجود دارد: این واژه بسیار مناسب کار من است زیرا هم مفهوم نقطه‌گذاری اشاره دارد و هم این که عکسهای مورد بحث من در حقیقت نقطه‌گذاری شده‌اند و گاهی حتا با این نقاط حساس، خال خال می‌شوند؛ دقیقاً این علامت‌ها و این زخم‌ها، نقاط بسیاری‌اند. بنابراین این عنصر دوم را که استودیوم را به هم می‌ریزد، پونکتوم می‌نامم؛ زیرا پونکتوم به معنی نیش، خال، بریدگی، سوراخ کوچک و نوعی تاس هم است.
پونکتوم یک عکس، حادثه‌ای است که در من فرو می‌رود و زخمی‌ام میکند، هم کبودم میکند و هم دردناک است».
نمیدانم دیدگاه عکاس ها و تئوریسین ها راجع به این کتاب چیست.ولی به عنوان یک آماتور و کسی که مشتاق عکاسی و سینما است میتوانم بگویم این کتاب دید مرا راجع به عکس به کلی عوض کرد و از این به بعد سعی میکنم از زوایای دیگری هم که رولان بارت تلویحا پیشنهاد میکند یک اثر را مشاهده کنم.
January 6, 2024
"The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time:
the one others think I am,
the one I want others to think I am,
the one the photographer thinks I am,
and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.
In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture..." (pg 13)
Barthes essay collection is a deep study of looking and observation, through the lens of the camera. Written in 1979, this was a later work for the French philosopher, but may be his best known. Perhaps the subject matter lends to that - images, photographs, history, gaze.
At the center of the essay is Barthes discussion of studium and punctum when looking at a photograph:
Studium relates to the observation and a general commitment to, sometimes a brief value judgement (like/dislike), "sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in all people, entertainments... one finds 'all right'".(pg 27) Maybe best describes as a passing glance, or more modern parlance, scrolling through.
Punctum relates to the object, item, or air that an observer sees right away. What "pierces, pricks, or punctuates". This may be different for each observer, in a portrait, a noticeable physical feature or piece of clothing, a facial expression, or body language. It could be something happening in the background or out of focus. It can be what "pricks" the mind to remember after you are no longer looking at the photograph. "...the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me, and I think back on it..." (pg 53)
Barthes uses a number of images as reference, ranging from portraiture by well-known photographers like Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, to historical and journalistic photographs of events, landscapes or architecture, to war photography.
While Part 1 is largely theoretical, referencing random photographs, Part 2 is highly personal. Barthes is writing this collection of essays shortly after his mother's death. He is in the apartment where she died and is going through her old photographs. He finds one particular photograph of his mother as a young girl that he calls the "Winter Garden Photograph", and uses this reference through several essays, discussing the imminence of Death as it relates to photography, the frozen moment, the sentimental/ordinary nature of photographs, and how every observer frames the photograph in terms of themselves as they view it.
"The date belongs to the photograph: not because it denotes style... but because it makes me lift my head, allows me to compute life, death, the inexorable extinction of the generations. I am the reference for every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is is that I am alive here and now?" (pg 84)
All the more interesting to read CAMERA LUCIDA at a time of super-charged image saturation, applying the studium and punctum techniques to each item that we see - too numerous to count. What would Barthes say about DALL-E image creation? Photoshop? How would Barthes fathom reels, TikToks?
"One might say that the photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible without the latter, this is that aberrant thing, an action of thought without thought, an aim without a target. Yet this is the scandalous movement which produces the rarest quality of an 'air'. This is the paradox: how can one have an intelligent 'air' without thinking anything intelligent, just by looking into this piece of black plastic?" (pg 111-112)
the one others think I am,
the one I want others to think I am,
the one the photographer thinks I am,
and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.
In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture..." (pg 13)
Barthes essay collection is a deep study of looking and observation, through the lens of the camera. Written in 1979, this was a later work for the French philosopher, but may be his best known. Perhaps the subject matter lends to that - images, photographs, history, gaze.
At the center of the essay is Barthes discussion of studium and punctum when looking at a photograph:
Studium relates to the observation and a general commitment to, sometimes a brief value judgement (like/dislike), "sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in all people, entertainments... one finds 'all right'".(pg 27) Maybe best describes as a passing glance, or more modern parlance, scrolling through.
Punctum relates to the object, item, or air that an observer sees right away. What "pierces, pricks, or punctuates". This may be different for each observer, in a portrait, a noticeable physical feature or piece of clothing, a facial expression, or body language. It could be something happening in the background or out of focus. It can be what "pricks" the mind to remember after you are no longer looking at the photograph. "...the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me, and I think back on it..." (pg 53)
Barthes uses a number of images as reference, ranging from portraiture by well-known photographers like Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, to historical and journalistic photographs of events, landscapes or architecture, to war photography.
While Part 1 is largely theoretical, referencing random photographs, Part 2 is highly personal. Barthes is writing this collection of essays shortly after his mother's death. He is in the apartment where she died and is going through her old photographs. He finds one particular photograph of his mother as a young girl that he calls the "Winter Garden Photograph", and uses this reference through several essays, discussing the imminence of Death as it relates to photography, the frozen moment, the sentimental/ordinary nature of photographs, and how every observer frames the photograph in terms of themselves as they view it.
"The date belongs to the photograph: not because it denotes style... but because it makes me lift my head, allows me to compute life, death, the inexorable extinction of the generations. I am the reference for every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is is that I am alive here and now?" (pg 84)
All the more interesting to read CAMERA LUCIDA at a time of super-charged image saturation, applying the studium and punctum techniques to each item that we see - too numerous to count. What would Barthes say about DALL-E image creation? Photoshop? How would Barthes fathom reels, TikToks?
"One might say that the photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible without the latter, this is that aberrant thing, an action of thought without thought, an aim without a target. Yet this is the scandalous movement which produces the rarest quality of an 'air'. This is the paradox: how can one have an intelligent 'air' without thinking anything intelligent, just by looking into this piece of black plastic?" (pg 111-112)
December 30, 2011
Patronizing and solipsistic as a discussion of photography. Barthes spends ample time assigning Latin names to elements of what is, essentially, irony, identifies their interaction as either clever or lame, and then abandons them. Other elements of photography are not considered, and instead he marvels at the possibility that the subject of an old photo may still be alive. He so much as admits he knows not much about photography, and goes on to talk at great length about himself instead.
I've been looking for an intellectual discourse on the nature of photography as an art; things that are found in the moment of the place, or of the artist, or of the viewer, use of aesthetic elements as a means of expressive language, style, approach, impact, intent, unintent, application of technical approach, so on. This book is none of those things and is not recommended under any circumstances in a meaningful study of the art.
I've been looking for an intellectual discourse on the nature of photography as an art; things that are found in the moment of the place, or of the artist, or of the viewer, use of aesthetic elements as a means of expressive language, style, approach, impact, intent, unintent, application of technical approach, so on. This book is none of those things and is not recommended under any circumstances in a meaningful study of the art.
July 10, 2008
Along with Susan Sontag's On Photography, Camera Lucida is one of the earliest and still most frequently cited analyses of the medium. This might seem strange considering how personal and 'literary' it is, but, whether for or against, academics continue to use this little book to make all sorts of exaggerated claims about visual culture.
As he acknowledges, Barthes' take on photography is determined by a phenomenological reduction. "...I decided to take myself as a mediator for all Photography. Starting from a few personal impulses, I would try to formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography" (8-9). He splits the photograph into punctum -- a 'point of interest' within the photo that is both responsible for its aesthetic quality and unique for each individual observer -- and studium, or more or less everything else: the signs of the photographer's intention and technical skill, the use of stereotypes, the setting, organization, the style of composition, everything to do with the photograph's 'themes' and culturally determined meanings.
How does one justify leaving out so much? Barthes does it by associating several features of photography with the studium while never associating any of them with each other. So 'taste' in the banal sense, technical knowledge (Barthes doesn't actually know anything about photography), knowledge of the thing photographed, and empathy with the photographic subject are all acknowledged separately, but declined on the same grounds: they don't pertain to photography's 'essence.' They are rather functions, 'myths,' involved merely in "reconciling the photograph with society" (28). So for Barthes the really radical thing is to relegate historical, political, biographical, personal, or whatever content of a given photograph to the realm of dull convention. It is 'unfortunate,' Barthes writes, though apparently necessary, that he finds Koen Wessing's photos of Nicaragua "banal." (23).
I think the problem is that, like photography, Barthes never goes beyond surface impressions. In a sense Barthes' analysis just repeats what he says photography does: "by leading me to believe...that I have found what Calvino calls 'the true total photograph,' it accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality ('that has been') with truth ('there-she-is!'); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being" (113). Recognizing the ease with which photography confuses experiential fact with Truth, Barthes accepts the confusion as necessary, leading to the paradoxical claim that the Real Truth of a photo is more visible the more it is 'liberated' from all explanatory context. Its false impression of immediacy can then be reflexively experienced in idiosyncratic ways by the observer (who, for instance, can go on to write about photography by writing about his mom).
Another good line, again relevant to both photography and Barthes' method of analysis: "photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs" (34).
As he acknowledges, Barthes' take on photography is determined by a phenomenological reduction. "...I decided to take myself as a mediator for all Photography. Starting from a few personal impulses, I would try to formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography" (8-9). He splits the photograph into punctum -- a 'point of interest' within the photo that is both responsible for its aesthetic quality and unique for each individual observer -- and studium, or more or less everything else: the signs of the photographer's intention and technical skill, the use of stereotypes, the setting, organization, the style of composition, everything to do with the photograph's 'themes' and culturally determined meanings.
How does one justify leaving out so much? Barthes does it by associating several features of photography with the studium while never associating any of them with each other. So 'taste' in the banal sense, technical knowledge (Barthes doesn't actually know anything about photography), knowledge of the thing photographed, and empathy with the photographic subject are all acknowledged separately, but declined on the same grounds: they don't pertain to photography's 'essence.' They are rather functions, 'myths,' involved merely in "reconciling the photograph with society" (28). So for Barthes the really radical thing is to relegate historical, political, biographical, personal, or whatever content of a given photograph to the realm of dull convention. It is 'unfortunate,' Barthes writes, though apparently necessary, that he finds Koen Wessing's photos of Nicaragua "banal." (23).
I think the problem is that, like photography, Barthes never goes beyond surface impressions. In a sense Barthes' analysis just repeats what he says photography does: "by leading me to believe...that I have found what Calvino calls 'the true total photograph,' it accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality ('that has been') with truth ('there-she-is!'); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being" (113). Recognizing the ease with which photography confuses experiential fact with Truth, Barthes accepts the confusion as necessary, leading to the paradoxical claim that the Real Truth of a photo is more visible the more it is 'liberated' from all explanatory context. Its false impression of immediacy can then be reflexively experienced in idiosyncratic ways by the observer (who, for instance, can go on to write about photography by writing about his mom).
Another good line, again relevant to both photography and Barthes' method of analysis: "photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs" (34).
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August 7, 2019Barthes fotoğraf üzerine düşünürken aslında çok daha geniş, çok öz bir kavrama odaklanıyor: bakış. Barthes'e göre fotoğrafı fotoğraf yapan ve diğer disiplinlerden ayıran şey bir tür zamansal eşdeğerlilik. Fotoğrafın çekildiği zaman ve fotoğrafa bakanın zamanı arasında bir kesişme. Fotoğrafın nesnesi olan kişinin bakışı, fotoğrafçının o anda bulunuşu -Barthes'e göre fotoğrafçının temel organı göz değil, el- ve fotoğrafa bakanın bakışı. Fotoğraf tüm bunları bir araya getirerek, geçmişteki bir bakışı uzatıp, şimdiye taşıyarak fotoğrafa bakan Barthes'i delip geçiyor.
''Fotoğrafın özü, temsil ettiği nesneyi onaylamasıdır.'' diyor Barthes.
Oysa yazının bu kesinlikten yoksun olduğunu söylüyor.
''Hiçbir yazı bana bu kesinliği veremez. Dilin talihsizliği (belki de aynı zamanda şehvetli zevki), doğruluğunu kanıtlayamamasıdır. Dilin noema'sı (özü) belki de bu güçsüzlüktür; ya da daha olumlu konuşursak: dil doğası gereği kurgusaldır; dili kurgusallıktan çıkarmaya girişmek için dev bir ölçüm aygıtı gerekir: ya mantığı çağırır, ya da onun yokluğuna yemin ederiz. Oysa fotoğraf bütün aracılardan farklıdır: o icad etmez; onun kendisi doğrulamadır zaten; arada sırada izin verdiği hünerler de pek bir kanıt oluşturmaz; bunlar tam tersine aldatmaca resimlerdir.''
Ama hayranlıkla karşı çıkıyorum. Barthes'in malzemesi bir zamanlar oturduğu yerden bir araya getirdiği kelimeler olan fotoğrafı; bana onun varlığını, zamanda kendine özgü bulunuşunu çekip getiriyor. Bana kalırsa bir kitap da zamanın bambaşka bir yerinde bulunan bambaşka birini; Barthes'ci anlamda delip geçebiliyor. Barthes bir zamanlar yaşıyordu, şimdi ölü, ama benimle konuşabiliyor.
''Fotoğrafın özü, temsil ettiği nesneyi onaylamasıdır.'' diyor Barthes.
Oysa yazının bu kesinlikten yoksun olduğunu söylüyor.
''Hiçbir yazı bana bu kesinliği veremez. Dilin talihsizliği (belki de aynı zamanda şehvetli zevki), doğruluğunu kanıtlayamamasıdır. Dilin noema'sı (özü) belki de bu güçsüzlüktür; ya da daha olumlu konuşursak: dil doğası gereği kurgusaldır; dili kurgusallıktan çıkarmaya girişmek için dev bir ölçüm aygıtı gerekir: ya mantığı çağırır, ya da onun yokluğuna yemin ederiz. Oysa fotoğraf bütün aracılardan farklıdır: o icad etmez; onun kendisi doğrulamadır zaten; arada sırada izin verdiği hünerler de pek bir kanıt oluşturmaz; bunlar tam tersine aldatmaca resimlerdir.''
Ama hayranlıkla karşı çıkıyorum. Barthes'in malzemesi bir zamanlar oturduğu yerden bir araya getirdiği kelimeler olan fotoğrafı; bana onun varlığını, zamanda kendine özgü bulunuşunu çekip getiriyor. Bana kalırsa bir kitap da zamanın bambaşka bir yerinde bulunan bambaşka birini; Barthes'ci anlamda delip geçebiliyor. Barthes bir zamanlar yaşıyordu, şimdi ölü, ama benimle konuşabiliyor.
March 25, 2018
Fotoğraf konusunun ölüm ve zaman konularını içine alacak şekilde yorumlanmış ve felsefileştirilmiş hali.
s. 69:
"Görüntü için gerekli koşul, görmedir" demiş Janouch, Kafka'ya; Kafka da gülümseyerek yanıtlamış: "Biz nesneleri aklımızdan çıkarmak için fotoğraflarız. Öykülerim, gözlerimi kapamamın bir yoludur."
s. 69:
"Görüntü için gerekli koşul, görmedir" demiş Janouch, Kafka'ya; Kafka da gülümseyerek yanıtlamış: "Biz nesneleri aklımızdan çıkarmak için fotoğraflarız. Öykülerim, gözlerimi kapamamın bir yoludur."
November 2, 2021
الغرفة المضيئة، هى محادثة ودودة و لطيفة مع رولان بارت في شرفة شارع هاديء في وقت مغادرة الشمس حديث ممتع و فلسفي و تأملي بسيط و شخصي فيه الفكاهة و الرصانة عن الفوتوغرافيا لا في ثوبها الضيق التقني أو من حيث قواعدها الفنية الجامدة لكن من حيث تأثيرها الشخصي عليه و الانطباعات التي تفجرها و الجرح الذي ترتكبه على استحياء و الارتباك الذى تحدثه الصورة رغم عشوائيتها و صمتها.
تُدرَس الفوتوغرافيا عادة كأنها علم رياضي قواعد و مفاهيم أكاديمية صارمة دون التطرق لروح الصورة، القواعد للدارسين الروح و العشوائية للهواة.
أعرف بيقين مشحون بالمسرّة أني سأرجع بين الحين و الآخر لقراءة أجزاء من هذا الكتاب، لا حاجة على سبيل الترفيه، لكن حاجة واعية و حقيقية و ضرورية، حاجة من أجل أرضاء رغبتي في الفن الذي لا أستطيع إنتاجه ولكن أعرف كيف أكتشفه و أحسّ به، الصور العادية و الألبومات التي أعرفها بدت جميلة و براقة جدًا فجأة بعد قراءة الكتاب.
تُدرَس الفوتوغرافيا عادة كأنها علم رياضي قواعد و مفاهيم أكاديمية صارمة دون التطرق لروح الصورة، القواعد للدارسين الروح و العشوائية للهواة.
أعرف بيقين مشحون بالمسرّة أني سأرجع بين الحين و الآخر لقراءة أجزاء من هذا الكتاب، لا حاجة على سبيل الترفيه، لكن حاجة واعية و حقيقية و ضرورية، حاجة من أجل أرضاء رغبتي في الفن الذي لا أستطيع إنتاجه ولكن أعرف كيف أكتشفه و أحسّ به، الصور العادية و الألبومات التي أعرفها بدت جميلة و براقة جدًا فجأة بعد قراءة الكتاب.
July 1, 2018
Μετά από 2,5 χρόνια καταφέρνω και τελειώνω τον φωτεινό θάλαμο. Ένα βιβλίο που είναι καλό (όντως είναι) για αυτούς που θέλουν να δουν την φωτογραφία σε ένα άλλο επίπεδο. Να μάθουν να διαβάζουν τις εικόνες με τέτοιο τρόπο ώστε να μπουν στο μυαλό του φωτογράφου και να βρουν την αιτία που τον έκανε να "κλικάρει" την συγκεκριμένη εικόνα, την συγκεκριμένη στιγμή με την συγκεκριμένη γωνία λήψης.
Οπτική αντίληψη, φιλοσοφικές προσεγγίσεις από τον Barthes που εμένα με άφησαν λίγο αδιάφορη αλλά καθόλου ασύμφωνη...
Οπτική αντίληψη, φιλοσοφικές προσεγγίσεις από τον Barthes που εμένα με άφησαν λίγο αδιάφορη αλλά καθόλου ασύμφωνη...
September 21, 2019
A fotografia democratizou-se. E, por isso, perdeu algum do seu encanto, espontaneidade e misticismo. Despertamos para a sua capacidade de contar a nossa história sem delongas. Mas a fotografia também mente: podemos agora ser aquele ou aquela que gostaríamos de ser; graças a um bom editor somos capazes de superar as nossas limitações genéticas.
Ora, quando Barthes escreveu este magnífico livro, o paradigma fotográfico ainda não tinha sofrido uma viragem. Mais do que um livro sobre fotografia, este livro fala da nossa ambição do perpétuo, da fotografia que nos apaixona porque é imutável, porque suprime o tempo até ao infinito, porque nos revela.
O livro incluiu algumas fotografias que enriquecem muito o texto. Ficamos surpreendidos a cada página com o olhar (sempre) original de Barthes. Para ele "a Fotografia tem alguma coisa a ver com a ressurreição", sendo que "através de cada uma delas [imagens], infalivelmente eu passava para além da irrealidade da coisa representada, entrava loucamente no espetáculo, na imagem, envolvendo com os meus braços o que está morto, o que vai morrer, tal como fez Nietzche, quando a 3 de Janeiro de 1889 laçou-se a chorar ao pescoço de um cavalo martirizado: enlouquecido por causa da Piedade."
O livro revela-nos também a crueldade da fotografia, dona de um tempo que jamais será o nosso. Como escreveu certa vez Paul Ricoeur (expressando muito bem este sentimento): "possuo uma fotografia dele (pai), tirada durante a sua única licença, no início do ano de 1915; a minha irmã e eu estamos sentados ao seu colo. Depois, tal imagem nunca mais se mexeu; mas envelheci e, pouco a pouco, tive de habituar-me à ideia de um pai mais jovem que eu, ao passo que no início tinha a imagem de um homem sem idade, situada abaixo de mim. Foi-me necesário integrá-la como sendo o rosto de um rapaz que eu ultrapasso na vida. Ainda hoje sou incapaz de negociar a relação com essa imagem eternamente parada na imagem de um rapaz. É também o que sinto diante dos monumentos aos mortos, diante dos "Às Nossas Crianças", questionando-me: mas quem são as crianças? Estranhamente, o monumento fala de uma criança que é o meu pai, a outra criança que não vai parar de envelhecer".
❤️
Ora, quando Barthes escreveu este magnífico livro, o paradigma fotográfico ainda não tinha sofrido uma viragem. Mais do que um livro sobre fotografia, este livro fala da nossa ambição do perpétuo, da fotografia que nos apaixona porque é imutável, porque suprime o tempo até ao infinito, porque nos revela.
O livro incluiu algumas fotografias que enriquecem muito o texto. Ficamos surpreendidos a cada página com o olhar (sempre) original de Barthes. Para ele "a Fotografia tem alguma coisa a ver com a ressurreição", sendo que "através de cada uma delas [imagens], infalivelmente eu passava para além da irrealidade da coisa representada, entrava loucamente no espetáculo, na imagem, envolvendo com os meus braços o que está morto, o que vai morrer, tal como fez Nietzche, quando a 3 de Janeiro de 1889 laçou-se a chorar ao pescoço de um cavalo martirizado: enlouquecido por causa da Piedade."
O livro revela-nos também a crueldade da fotografia, dona de um tempo que jamais será o nosso. Como escreveu certa vez Paul Ricoeur (expressando muito bem este sentimento): "possuo uma fotografia dele (pai), tirada durante a sua única licença, no início do ano de 1915; a minha irmã e eu estamos sentados ao seu colo. Depois, tal imagem nunca mais se mexeu; mas envelheci e, pouco a pouco, tive de habituar-me à ideia de um pai mais jovem que eu, ao passo que no início tinha a imagem de um homem sem idade, situada abaixo de mim. Foi-me necesário integrá-la como sendo o rosto de um rapaz que eu ultrapasso na vida. Ainda hoje sou incapaz de negociar a relação com essa imagem eternamente parada na imagem de um rapaz. É também o que sinto diante dos monumentos aos mortos, diante dos "Às Nossas Crianças", questionando-me: mas quem são as crianças? Estranhamente, o monumento fala de uma criança que é o meu pai, a outra criança que não vai parar de envelhecer".
❤️
January 30, 2024
нетипово, поетично, щиро, філософськи, багатошарово.
мені сподобалося як Барт рефлексує стосовно кожного окремого фото, наскільки він намагається зрозуміти себе завдяки фото, зрозуміти фото завдяки собі, як намагається розкласти емоції, сутність враження та самого зображення життя, смерті, часу.
розумію, що пройде скількись років і я візьмуся перечитувати книгу знову.
(раджу читати тим, хто фотографує і хто цікавиться мистецтвом).
мені сподобалося як Барт рефлексує стосовно кожного окремого фото, наскільки він намагається зрозуміти себе завдяки фото, зрозуміти фото завдяки собі, як намагається розкласти емоції, сутність враження та самого зображення життя, смерті, часу.
розумію, що пройде скількись років і я візьмуся перечитувати книгу знову.
(раджу читати тим, хто фотографує і хто цікавиться мистецтвом).
November 14, 2014
كتاب جميل يقدم من خلاله رولان بارت الفتوغرافيا برؤية فلسفية فمنولوجية خاصة. بمعنى أدق صورة ذاتية في التصور والفكر .
مساعي بارت في الفتوغرافيا كانت في سبيل الخروج والوصول الى استنتاجات غير التي تكون متبوعة او مشروحة بمنظور اجتماعي، وذلك بغرض مقاومة اي نظام مختزل!
ومن منطلق خبرة الذات المشاهدة، وخبرة الموضوع المشاهد، علاقة الدال الفوتوغرافي ،
سيمياء الصورة الفوتوغرافية، والنظر وراء الصورة الكلية ومحاولة القبض على ذلك الشيء الخفي والغير ظاهر.
( البوكنتوم) وهو مصطلح اخترعه بارت، ويطلقه على التفصيلة المعينة في الصورة التي تثير أو تخلق هالة ما في نفسه، والتي من خلالها يسعى الى تحليل الصورة الفوتوغرافية والقبض على وحيها الضامر في اللايقين. منطقة انعدام الظل كما أراها .
( الوجد الفوتوغرافي) علاقة دالة ومتأثرة بجوهر الصورة الفوتوغرافية بالواقع.
فالصورة الفوتوغرافية كما يتلمسها بارت تقدم على مستوى تخيلي اللحظة شديدة الغموض، حيث لا يكون عندها ذاتاً ولا موضوعاً؛ بل بالأحرى ذاتاً تشعر بأنها ستصير موضوعاً.
ان الفوتوغرافيا فن يفتقر الى اليقين.
وهي في الأغلب تفصل الانتباه عن الإدراك .
يرى رولان بارت أن الفوتوغرافيا اقرب للمسرح، ولم تتماس مع الفن من خلال الرسم. كما أن هناك رابط أو وسيط يبعث على التأمل حقاً، بين المسرح والصورة الفوتوغرافية ، ألا وهو الموت ! الفوتوغرافيا كما يراها رولان بارت، تتصل في شيء ما بالبعث!
الفوتوغرافيا: هي موضوع أنثرووبولوجي جديد. ويطرح هنا بارت عدة تساؤلات هل الصورة تماثلية ام مشفرة؟ وما هي ماهية الهوية الفوتوغرافية ؟
ان الكتاب يطرح العديد من الأفكار التأملية، الباعثة على الشك والبحث والتساؤل. و لا يقدم ايجابات حاسمة او واضحة في صورتها الكلية، بل ومضات فكرية نابضة.
رولان بارت مفكر ممتع للغاية. و لا يمل.
مساعي بارت في الفتوغرافيا كانت في سبيل الخروج والوصول الى استنتاجات غير التي تكون متبوعة او مشروحة بمنظور اجتماعي، وذلك بغرض مقاومة اي نظام مختزل!
ومن منطلق خبرة الذات المشاهدة، وخبرة الموضوع المشاهد، علاقة الدال الفوتوغرافي ،
سيمياء الصورة الفوتوغرافية، والنظر وراء الصورة الكلية ومحاولة القبض على ذلك الشيء الخفي والغير ظاهر.
( البوكنتوم) وهو مصطلح اخترعه بارت، ويطلقه على التفصيلة المعينة في الصورة التي تثير أو تخلق هالة ما في نفسه، والتي من خلالها يسعى الى تحليل الصورة الفوتوغرافية والقبض على وحيها الضامر في اللايقين. منطقة انعدام الظل كما أراها .
( الوجد الفوتوغرافي) علاقة دالة ومتأثرة بجوهر الصورة الفوتوغرافية بالواقع.
فالصورة الفوتوغرافية كما يتلمسها بارت تقدم على مستوى تخيلي اللحظة شديدة الغموض، حيث لا يكون عندها ذاتاً ولا موضوعاً؛ بل بالأحرى ذاتاً تشعر بأنها ستصير موضوعاً.
ان الفوتوغرافيا فن يفتقر الى اليقين.
وهي في الأغلب تفصل الانتباه عن الإدراك .
يرى رولان بارت أن الفوتوغرافيا اقرب للمسرح، ولم تتماس مع الفن من خلال الرسم. كما أن هناك رابط أو وسيط يبعث على التأمل حقاً، بين المسرح والصورة الفوتوغرافية ، ألا وهو الموت ! الفوتوغرافيا كما يراها رولان بارت، تتصل في شيء ما بالبعث!
الفوتوغرافيا: هي موضوع أنثرووبولوجي جديد. ويطرح هنا بارت عدة تساؤلات هل الصورة تماثلية ام مشفرة؟ وما هي ماهية الهوية الفوتوغرافية ؟
ان الكتاب يطرح العديد من الأفكار التأملية، الباعثة على الشك والبحث والتساؤل. و لا يقدم ايجابات حاسمة او واضحة في صورتها الكلية، بل ومضات فكرية نابضة.
رولان بارت مفكر ممتع للغاية. و لا يمل.
March 8, 2007
while to many this book is another of barthes extended fragmentary ramblings on modern media, this is actually a touching novella about a solitary man's recognition of his own humanity upon the death of his mother. he so longs for transcendence, redemption, and eternal life and he prays it might come through the archives and the text. and yet he sadly worries it might not. and that his intellectual musings have somehow missed the point. if you ever wondered what in search of lost time was really about but didn't want to leaf through the 3000 pages (but i recommend you do that) then this a short treatise on what proust was doing in telling his story.
December 1, 2016
بارت در کتاب "اتاق روشن" از عکسهایی حرف می زند که به هیجانش آورده اند یا زخمش زده اند -که او این خاصیت زخم زننده را پنهان در چیزی می داند که پونکتومش می خواند- و در روند پدیدارشناسی عکسهای مهم زندگی اش، می رسد به عکس باغ زمستانی که کودکی مادرش را در خود دارد –بارت کتاب را یکی دو سالی پس از مرگ مادر نوشت- بارت در کتاب، تصویر تمام عکسهایی را که درباره شان حرفی می زند، یا ذکری می رود ازشان، منتشر کرده است، با تاریخ و جزئیات. –مضحک اینکه در چاپ جدیدی از ترجمه فارسی که من دارم، کیفیت عکسها اینقدر بد و مضحک است که جزئیات مورد اشاره ی بارت به هیچ وجه پدیدار نیستند، سگک کفشی، گردنبند طلائی، زخم انگشت، بند کفشی و...
اما بارت وقتی می رسد به عکس "باغ زمستانی" در پرانتز می نویسد که من نمی توانم این عکس را در اینجا چاپ کنم، چون این عکس در ساحت درک و حس شما عکسی عادی است و هی�� زخمی به شما نمی زند، این عکس فقط برای من وجود دارد. بارت عکس را نشانمان نمی دهد و مدام از آن حرف می زند.
عکس کودکی مادر بارت برای تمام خوانندگان گزاره ایی ممکن و منتظر است که از پراکندگی گفتارهای بارت شکلی می گیرد و لحظه ایی دیگر شکلش را از دست می دهد. مثل بازیابی چهره ایی در خواب.
بارت خود در چند صفحه قبل تر، هنگامی که از مرگ مادرش می نویسد و خواب دیدنش و عکاسی، می نویسد:
" و مواجهه با عکس و خواب دیدن هر دو مشابه هم اند، همان تقلای سیزیف هستند: باز به بالا رفتن برای رسیدن به ماهیت، باز پایین آمدن بدون دیدنش و باز از سرگرفتن..."
تاكيد كنم كه اين ترجمه خوب درآمده و ترجمه هاي ديگر چنين كيفيتي ندارد مطمئن باشيد
اتاق روشن I رولان بارت I ترجمه ی فرشید آذرنگ I حرفه نویسنده I 1387
اما بارت وقتی می رسد به عکس "باغ زمستانی" در پرانتز می نویسد که من نمی توانم این عکس را در اینجا چاپ کنم، چون این عکس در ساحت درک و حس شما عکسی عادی است و هی�� زخمی به شما نمی زند، این عکس فقط برای من وجود دارد. بارت عکس را نشانمان نمی دهد و مدام از آن حرف می زند.
عکس کودکی مادر بارت برای تمام خوانندگان گزاره ایی ممکن و منتظر است که از پراکندگی گفتارهای بارت شکلی می گیرد و لحظه ایی دیگر شکلش را از دست می دهد. مثل بازیابی چهره ایی در خواب.
بارت خود در چند صفحه قبل تر، هنگامی که از مرگ مادرش می نویسد و خواب دیدنش و عکاسی، می نویسد:
" و مواجهه با عکس و خواب دیدن هر دو مشابه هم اند، همان تقلای سیزیف هستند: باز به بالا رفتن برای رسیدن به ماهیت، باز پایین آمدن بدون دیدنش و باز از سرگرفتن..."
تاكيد كنم كه اين ترجمه خوب درآمده و ترجمه هاي ديگر چنين كيفيتي ندارد مطمئن باشيد
اتاق روشن I رولان بارت I ترجمه ی فرشید آذرنگ I حرفه نویسنده I 1387
September 27, 2019
It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all.
[listening to Philip Jeck's 7 album as I write, appropriate, evocative.]
This treatment of photography appears grounded in a sense of time and thus in a sense of loss. Ephemeral beings contemplating moments which are lost--even if preserved in an image, the distillation of memory obscures and distorts. Barthes weaves a pair of concepts which illustrate how an image can inform us, or be informed by our recognition of its context or how a photograph can affect us, leave a wound, an impression, an unexpected response or feeling. Barthes cites Godard, who said there is no just image, there's just an image. There's much to ponder in a week when transparency becomes a debatable concept. Somehow this idea of photographic mourning becomes an almost atonement. Barthes notes, [t]he photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.
[listening to Philip Jeck's 7 album as I write, appropriate, evocative.]
This treatment of photography appears grounded in a sense of time and thus in a sense of loss. Ephemeral beings contemplating moments which are lost--even if preserved in an image, the distillation of memory obscures and distorts. Barthes weaves a pair of concepts which illustrate how an image can inform us, or be informed by our recognition of its context or how a photograph can affect us, leave a wound, an impression, an unexpected response or feeling. Barthes cites Godard, who said there is no just image, there's just an image. There's much to ponder in a week when transparency becomes a debatable concept. Somehow this idea of photographic mourning becomes an almost atonement. Barthes notes, [t]he photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.
November 27, 2015
This is THE PHOTOGRAPHY ! This is THE real art. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
I have found my soul on Photography. Thats it.
I have found my soul on Photography. Thats it.
August 2, 2010
I spent this afternoon looking through old black & white photos from the fifties taken by my father, of the extended family. My cousins, now dead or old, as they were when young, at birthday, Easter and Christmas parties, and my mother as an attractive young woman with her life before her. Of myself in one group photo, aged 1 year, somewhat annoyed at sliding off my cousin Janet’s 8-year-old knee as I try to read my book, believe it or not!
I’ve often thought this – that when you look into a camera the audience is unimaginable, and you are dead, along with all your friends and family and other loved ones that you take for granted so much, and indeed your whole world. Everything here as I glance out of the window, is already gone.
I read a diary of mine from 1984 a few years back and I’d written at one point, ‘All this, that seems to be happening now, happened many years ago, and I too am dead and gone.’ The first part of the sentence was true, and the second part will be fairly soon. All the more reason to tell people unreservedly how much they mean to you before it’s too late.
I’ve often thought this – that when you look into a camera the audience is unimaginable, and you are dead, along with all your friends and family and other loved ones that you take for granted so much, and indeed your whole world. Everything here as I glance out of the window, is already gone.
I read a diary of mine from 1984 a few years back and I’d written at one point, ‘All this, that seems to be happening now, happened many years ago, and I too am dead and gone.’ The first part of the sentence was true, and the second part will be fairly soon. All the more reason to tell people unreservedly how much they mean to you before it’s too late.
May 12, 2018
Bazen bir kadrajın karşısına geçer poz veririz bazen de biz istemeden bir kareye gireriz. O an yaşanmıştır ve bir kareye kaydedilmiştir. Sadece bu. Fotoğraf karesindeki herkesin ölmüş olabileceği ve ölecek olması muhtemeldir. Fotoğrafın sonsuza dek kopyaladığı şey aslında yalnız bir kere olmuştur. Fotoğraf ve ölüm üzerine yazılmış mükemmel bir kitap. Fotoğrafa biraz ilgisi olan kişilerin mutlaka okuması gerekir.
‘Ben öldükten sonra bir başkası tarafından çöpe atılacak olan şu fotoğrafla birlikte yitip gidecek olan şey aslında nedir?’
‘Ben öldükten sonra bir başkası tarafından çöpe atılacak olan şu fotoğrafla birlikte yitip gidecek olan şey aslında nedir?’
May 1, 2020
Meu lance com Barthes vai além da minha profunda paixão por Semiótica, mais do que sobre o que ele escreve, meu prazer em sua leitura está no como ele escreve.
Exalando cultura, Barthes é um dos mais deliciosos teóricos da palavra justamente por saber usá-la com maestria e estou dando cinco estrelas para este livro em que ele destrincha a arte fotográfica de forma afetiva, não porque concordo inteiramente com ele, longe disso, mas porque é um deleite absorver cada frase.
Exalando cultura, Barthes é um dos mais deliciosos teóricos da palavra justamente por saber usá-la com maestria e estou dando cinco estrelas para este livro em que ele destrincha a arte fotográfica de forma afetiva, não porque concordo inteiramente com ele, longe disso, mas porque é um deleite absorver cada frase.
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