Camera Lucida

I had mixed reactions to Roland Barthes's book Camera Lucida. It took me awhile to understand his writing style and his personal voice throughout the book. I see that it was translated from the original French version but still it took me some time to understand his style. I described it to someone that I felt like I was having a conversation with a friend or acquaintance but they wouldn't like me respond or talk back to them in the conversation. He did make some very good points throughout the book however. He started out right away saying "Why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other?" which made me start really thinking about my own experience and why I choose to photograph certain things. I like to work with portraits but why do I like that... I really thought about it and I don't want to lose any relationship with anyone and by me documenting them its like they're now part of my world forever even if they're not physically here. He talks about the operator and the spectator. Its a nice way to think about act of taking pictures. Along with that he talked about posing for a picture and how one becomes aware they are posing. He says "I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image." Working with models I see this all the time, but I see it in myself when I get photographed as well. He seems very aware of his own body in front of the camera and understands in a way that he can articulate. "I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from any effigy." I like that he's almost calling people out. He's making the point to say that the picture of yourself being see as is a conscious output. Thats never been more true then now with facebook and twitter and all the social sites where we put our "socially constructed" image of self. "In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I 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." Barthes kind of segues into briefly into erotic verses pornographic, which was interesting and I really agreed with him a how he justified both. From that section I really like this quote "The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond -as if the image launched desire beyond that it permits us to see: not only toward "the rest" of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together." The second part of the book moves into him discovering different pictures of his family and mother after she has passed away. I never really thought about what makes a picture of someone look like that person and really encompass who they are until he started talking about pictures that he knew were his mother but didn't really seem like her and why they didn't. He says " History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it -and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it." I related to his situation because when my grandmother passed away a few years ago I put together a dvd of photos of her life growing up for my family and her friends. As i was looking through hundreds of pictures of her life I knew who I was looking was my grandmother but I didn't see her. Not in all of them. He says " I dream about her, I do not dream her." It took me a while for more understand what he was talking about. I really started to enjoy the book as it was winding down. I have highlighted many little quotes he has said that mean something to me or spoke to me. While I don't want to write the longest blog novel ever on this book I still want to tell you which ones (besides the ones above) that spoke to me.
"cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing." "photography is an uncertain art" "However 'lifelike' we strive to make it, Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead." "The photograph becomes 'surprising' when we do not know why it has been taken.""Photographs of landscape (urban or country) must be habitable, not visitable.""I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not 'find' her." "For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable." "The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been." I could keep going and going and expand on all of those but you (and I) would be here for longer than intended. I'm really pleased with out much I enjoyed the book and will defiantly look back on it for help and inspiration in the coming years and possibly make my students read it when I begin teaching.


" I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."