When I started this book the other night and read up to chapter 8, I dreaded reading the rest of it. I thought Barthes should chill out for a couple minutes and stop over-analyzing photography. Indeed, throughout the book he seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the medium. When I picked up the book again today, however, my outlook changed as I found myself intrigued by different thoughts he had and especially chapters 27-29 when he talks about his mother and compares dreams to photographs, "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: sometimes, in the dream, there is something misplaced, something excessive...And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again." He says earlier, " I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her
being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else." I love that. It's so true, and it makes me wonder about the whole concept of recognition. It's true that in dreams someone you
know is your father or your friend can assume the appearance of someone else, maybe someone on the periphery of your life. Also, when someone dies and you see them at an open casket wake, their body is the same body, but their soul, their essence, is no longer within it. I think in heaven we will recognize the essence of people, their souls. This was an intriguing topic that Barthes delved into.
I also liked that I got to know this author through his sharing about his thoughts on photography, some of which I agreed with and some of which I didn't. I found him to be slightly obsessive and annoyingly over-analytical, as I've mentioned. But I also relate to him sometimes, as in the first chapter when he discusses how he was amazed by the photograph of the emperor's brother and no one shared in this amazement. He adds in parenthesis, "life consists of these little touches of solitude." So true. And he talks about it later when he discovers the photograph of his mother as a little girl as having captured the essence of who she was. I wanted to see this photograph so bad, but he did not include it in the book and gave the reason that it exists only for him, that "at most it would interest your
studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound." This alone makes me love photography. It is so personal.
I found his terms "
studium," and "
punctum," cute ways of assigning meaning to the different ways a photograph affects the viewer. I think they're helpful, actually. So often images appeal only to the "
studium." It's all right, but it doesn't truly engage me. It is the rare photograph which reveals the "
punctum," that beautiful arresting moment that demands my gaze, or causes me to feel something.
I liked the bit in chapter 34 about black-and-white verses color photographs. First he talks about light as "A sort of umbilical cord [which] links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed." Love that. Then he goes on to talk about how "photograph" would be said in Latin, "image revealed, extracted, mounted, expressed by the action of light." Beautiful! He goes on to express that he feels black-and-white photographs are essentially more truthful than color photographs. "Color is a cosmetic."
I love the line in chapter 35, "Photography has something to do with resurrection." I agree. "Always the photograph astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself inexhaustibly."
I wonder what Barthes would think about digital photography. He often talks about photography's truthfulness, it's indisputable factual quality. "And yet, because it was a photograph, I could not deny..." In chapter 41, "I can have the fond hope of discovering truth only because Photography's
noeme is precisely
that-has-been..." With Digital Photography, photographs are no longer indisputable facts. I feel like Barthes might hate what photography has become because he would find he can no longer trust it. Back in the day, photography could re-shape memory, in a way, expose memory's inability to recall events correctly.
Barthes talks a lot about portraiture, and what he says reveals quite a bit of the truth about portraits, I think. He talks about capturing the essence of someone, as close as you can get to their soul. This is the quality he finds in the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother. He sees deeper than just the body. He says in chapter 45, "...if [the photographer] cannot, either by lack of talent or bad luck, supply the transparent soul its bright shadow, the subject dies forever. I have been photographed a thousand times; but if these thousand photographs have each 'missed' my air, my effigy will perpetuate my identity, not my value." He rejoices in the photograph of his mother which captures this.
Chapter 48 was a little depressing. It doesn't sound like Barthes likes fine art photography. He says in chapter 48, "Photography can in fact be art: when there is no longer madness in it, when its
noeme is forgotten and when consequently its essence no longer acts on me..." I disagree. I think any photograph, whether journalistic or other in intent, which produces in you the
punctum can be considered art. It struck a cord in me when he talked about taming the photograph by generalizing it. This is happening (has happened) in our society whether we like it or not. And, consequently, as he said, "when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it." Sad.
I like his definition (Calvino's definition) of "the true total photograph," accomplishing "the unheard-of identification of reality ("that-has-been") with truth ("there-she-is!)." While I love when photographs unite reality and truth, I also appreciate and love (unlike Barthes) photographs which successfully evoke a dream-like state, those which are decidedly untrue, as well as the digitally enhanced.
