Wk 7 Seminar – Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes was a French literary critic and philosopher. Although he wasn’t a photographer he studied semiotics and explored social theory and anthropology.

The book Camera Lucida is a book of two halves, the first studies photography, its contents and it’s purpose. The second half becomes a personal work all centred around a photograph of his recently deceased mother, attempting to make sense of why this one photograph affects him, and other photographs affect him similarly. It’s recommended as essential reading for photographers and artists.

Not mentioned in the seminar/lecture I feel it is important to mention what a Camera Lucida actually is. Before the advent of photography using chemical processes a device called a Camera Lucida (Light Chamber) allowed artists to use a special optical lens to look through to the scene and down at the paper simultaneously, therefore allowing the artist to mark the paper in exactly the correct places. The Camera Obscura (Dark Chamber) is a dark room with a hole in one part that allows the image of outside to be projected onto the walls or a specially designed table/surface.

The fact that Barthes named his book Camera Lucida suggests to me that he sees photography as being another method of capturing the images in front of us using a method to capture what we wish to include in the scene. It could also be a play on the words, to imply that he is helping the reader “see the light” in regards to photography as a practice and why some photos attract our attention and some are passed over with merely a cursory glance.

Part One:

Operator , Spectrum and Spectator

The Operator is obviously the photographer or the person who makes the image.

The Spectrum is the subject of the photograph or as Barthes calls them , the Referent.

Spectator is anyone viewing the images or photographs.

Studium & Punctum

Studium, according to Barthes is  the meaning of the photograph which is always coded in the contents of the image

Punctum is something that “pricks, wounds, or bruises” the emotions of the spectator and keeps the attention, it’s not coded , just there.

We talked about the photographs “Nicaragua 1979” by Koen Wessing and “Andy Warhol” by Duane Michals 1958 as to the Studium in each of the photographs. In the Warhol image, Barthes ignores the pose of hands in front of Warhol’s face as his attention is drawn to the “spatulate nails” (p 45) and it seems to affect him in a way that doesn’t bother me at all. My brother Mike bites his nails and always has since childhood so if Warhol had been a nail biter then it may have chimed with me differently.

Alice asked us the question whether she could show us examples of “Punctums”?

The class agreed that this wouldn’t be possible as everyone has their own triggers that might be affected by completely different and seemingly innocuous portions of an image.

Other examples.

We talked about the “Family Portrait” image by James Van Der Zee from 1926 and how Barthes was originally affected by the Punctum of the photograph being the low worn belt of the sister/mammy and the strapped pumps. (p. 43) only on page 53 he has had a chance to soak up the photo and now finds the necklace to prick him as he had a family member who had the same item of jewellery.  This is Barthes telling us that Punctums change  over time after you’ve spent time thinking about the Image and analysing each of the details contained therein.  He tells us that the “Punctum could accommodate a certain latency” and “In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes”

We then discussed what Barthes calls a “Blind Field” which is when we are affected by the punctum and then begin to imagine a story of the subject outside of the image. He mentions in movies that when a character is off screen you still imagine them going about their daily business but photographs do not generally have this effect. He states that the Punctum will cause this “Blind Field” to be created, we discussed it as a class and thought of it as a parallel universe or other-worldly existence for the subjects.

Part Two:

First off we discussed the importance of the Winter Garden Photograph that Barthes describes to us but never actually shows us. A Winter Garden is an old phrase for a conservatory on the rear of a house. Even if he did share it he states that “it would be nothing but an indifferent picture” to people and that the punctum he felt pricked/wounded by would not affect most other people as they have no emotional link to the image.

“That has been” is apparently the Noeme of photography. A noeme can be thought of as the smallest unit of meaning. He discusses the “That Has Been” as something that was captured upon the photosensitive material at the very moment of the image being made and that it can never be replicated. The subject can never be exactly caught again at that moment of it’s existence and the environment that existed at the same time. Alice said that at this point it becomes clear that Barthes sees photographs as a reminder of mortality, a “memento mori” if you prefer.

The Punctum in the images discussed thus far in the seminar all appeared in the image as a physical object or characteristic. Barthes also talks about Time being a punctum and Alice shared with us an image by Alexander Gardner of Lewis Payne (1865) in which a criminal was photographed just prior to being hanged for an attempted assassination. The Punctum in this image according to Barthes is that Payne is going to die soon after the image was taken, “He is going to die”. This is true of any person captured in a photograph but the circumstances make it something unavoidable to think about.

Poignantly this was close to the time for the 11am Two Minute Silence to remember the dead from wars around the world and I found myself replaying images in my mind from Peter Jackson’s 2018 film “They shall not grow old” in which most of the people captured on film in the First World War are likely to be dead today.

The tannoy in the Molyneux stadium which signalled the beginning of the two minutes then announced the end before it was back to discussing how Barthes described “every photograph is a catastrophe”. He says this as each person is either dead already or will be dead eventually and this coupled with the grief of his mother’s recent death was a reminder for him of how this image of a small girl represented someone who would ultimately never escape death.

Memory and Mortality

We discussed what we can take away from Barthes book and it amounted to the fact that photograph captures something irreplicable that has died since, (the moment or the person).

Resurrection of the dead can be achieved by thinking about the “Spectrum” as Barthes calls it. He refers to the fact that light from the sun or another source touched the subject’s person/face and was then reflected from there to land upon the film when the shutter opened to receive it. This change in the chemical process is as a result of this interaction. When a print or projection is made from this negative the photons are allowed to continue on their journey. An analogy I made of this is like a fossil in that something exists because of something else interacting with the ground/soil that encapsulated and transformed it into the fossilised remains. Yes I think I will call it a photon fossil. Barthes refers to the link as an umbilical cord between the viewer and the thing/person photographed.

Contemporary Responses to Barthes’ book.

The book, Camera Lucida, is considered as an essential piece of literature for people learning about photography and art and as such there have been many different responses to his work. One of these is the website http://wintergardenphotograph.com , a project by Odette England where artists were invited to image or be inspired by the unseen Winter Garden Photograph (WGP) . It contains responses in different forms that the people who submitted them find to be their Punctum or something that reminds them of their version of the WGP.

Alice showed us examples from England’s project from Alec Soth, Dan Estabrook and Barbara Diener all produced work based upon Barthes’ Winter Garden Photograph.

We were introduced to some artists/photographers who might use parts of Barthes philosophies to produce their work. Some more obviously than others.

Gerhard Richter creates paintings that look like blurred photographs to create the appearance of movement and also instil some notion of time passing by during the image production.

Idris Khan who creates some art by photographing items such as books and then joins them all together. He did this with a copy of Barthes Camera Lucida amongst other texts.

The word Palimpsest was used to describe these book works so I had to look up that definition and found that it could be anything where an older work has been removed and the surface reused  whilst retaining the appearance of the previous use.

We watched a video by Hirshhorn Museum of Khan being interviewed about his work and it was fascinating to see how he also overlaid the Becher’s water towers on top of each other to produce an almost moving and spinning image.

Susan Sontag’s Book “On Photography” was mentioned by Alice so I’ve purchased that from eBay and will receive that this week. It’s been mentioned a few times and referenced a good deal.

Another artist referenced was Christian Boltanski who was interviewed in another video about his work of images of children on a belt being mechanically drawn through a large machine in a piece of work called Chance  that illustrates the differences between the number of people being born and dying on a daily basis. He also produced “Photo album of the family 1939-1964” which was a chronological series of photographs of someone else’s family and this reinforced the point that we feel nothing for the people in these images, i.e. no punctums, except if we can relate an event in a photograph to an event we’ve experienced in the past.

A project called “Floh” by Tacita Dean shows images found by the artist in flea markets around the world and collated into a collection but gave her issues when she needed to actively cease the pursuit of images, because she was trying to avoid the conclusion of the collection/project. She presented the images with no explanations and lets the viewer make up their own story about the image and the subjects included on the paper.

The last artist Alice showed us was Fiona Tan who worked with some found mugshot images of pickpockets and invited writers to author a monologue from the point of view of the person in the photo. Actors then recorded these monologues and they’re played alongside the images, thus creating a “Blind Field” that contains information as to what happened outside the frame of the photograph.

Final Part

The last part of the seminar included the details of a task that Alice was setting us.

• Find a Studium – a photograph that interests you, which is coded

• Find a punctum – locate a photograph that ‘pricks’ you and reflect upon it.

This could be a photograph you’ve researched already, a found photograph that you know very little about or a personal photograph that you/your family own…

• What is the punctum? Why do you think it had this effect?

My response to this task will be in a forthcoming post, once I’ve had a think about which images prick, bruise or wound me…