Roland Barthes on photography

signiance
punctum studium
transforms records
cultural code natural noncode
ideological traumatic
symbolic obvious or informational
caption photograph
connotation denotation
signied (meaning) signifer (representation)
CODE MESSAGE
Barthes: Camera Lucida
! Public / Private responses to the photograph
! Barthes and the return to phenomenology
! To define the eidos of photography
! eidos = appearance, idea, constitutive nature, species
! What common basis unites all our otherwise different
encounters with photography?
! The noeme or essence of photography
! What I intentionalize in photography is that-has-
been.
! The intentionality of imagination, or a purely personal
relation to the photograph
Barthes:
the eidos of photography
! The essential nature of our subjective
experience of photography is defined by an
irreducible singularity.
! To experience time as a singular and
unrepeatable event.
! Every photograph is a certification of presence
! I want a history of looking (12), or the
irreducibility of the emotional experience of
looking at photographs.
! the Spectrum: the experience of being-
photographed
! the Spectator: the desire and emotion aroused by the
act of looking at specific photographs
To experience time as a singular and
non-repeatable event.
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
. . . The Photograph . . . represents the very
subtle moment when . . . I am neither subject
nor object but a subject who feels he is
becoming an an object: I then experience a
micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am
truly becoming a specter (14).
The studium and the punctum
! The studium refers to the range of
photographic meanings available and obvious
to everyone.
! The studium is:
! Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained
whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance.
! Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal
comprehensible way.
! The studium is:
! Unary. The image is a unified and self-contained
whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance.
! Coded. Pictorial space is ordered in a universal
comprehensible way.
The studium and the punctum
! The punctum (Latin) = trauma (Greek)
! inspires an intensely private meaning
! escapes language--it is not easily
communicated through linguistic resources
! is historical, as an experience of the
irrefutable indexicality of the photograph
! The punctum as a partial object or detail
that attracts and holds my gaze.
! The photograph is a temporal
hallucination (115).
! the photographic and the filmic images
The punctum as a partial object or
detail that attracts and holds my gaze
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 . . . . (115).