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
“. . . 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 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).
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