Roland Barthes on photographyMESSAGE CODE

signifer (representation) signified (meaning)

denotation connotation

photograph caption

obvious or informational symbolic

traumatic ideological

“natural” noncode cultural code

records transforms

studium punctum

signifiance

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).