Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography Book

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.