Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes is a philosophical meditation on the nature of photography, structured as 48 short reflections divided into two parts. Rather than offering a systematic theory, Barthes grounds his investigation in subjective response, using his own reactions to specific photographs as evidence for broader claims about what makes photography unique.

Barthes begins with a personal anecdote: He once saw a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jérôme, taken in 1852, and was struck by amazement at looking at eyes that had looked at the Emperor. This fascination drove him to discover what Photography is "in itself," what essential feature distinguishes it from all other kinds of images. He finds that Photography resists classification: Every available category is external to the medium and could apply equally to painting or drawing. What makes Photography distinct is the absolute adherence of the photograph to its referent. A photograph is bound to its subject in a way that painting and language are not. Dissatisfied with existing approaches, Barthes resolves to ground his inquiry in subjectivity, using his own responses as the basis for what he calls a mathesis singularis, a science of the individual rather than the universal.

He identifies three positions relative to any photograph: the Operator (the photographer), the Spectator (the viewer), and the Spectrum (the person or thing photographed), a term he chooses because it evokes both "spectacle" and the return of the dead. Since he is not a photographer, Barthes limits his investigation to the Spectator and the observed subject. Posing before a camera, he reflects, triggers a self-conscious fabrication of another body and a sensation of inauthenticity. Being photographed enacts a small version of death: The subject becomes a specter.

As Spectator, Barthes describes his reactions to photographs as chaotic. Certain images provoke jubilation or a lacerating sensation; others produce indifference. He calls the attraction certain photographs exert "adventure": A photograph either animates him or it does not. He adopts a deliberately unsystematic phenomenology, insisting that Photography's essence cannot be separated from the feeling it produces.

From these observations, Barthes develops the book's central conceptual pair. Pausing at a photograph by the Dutch photojournalist Koen Wessing depicting a ruined street in Nicaragua with two soldiers and, behind them, two nuns, he realizes that the image's power derives from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements. He names the first element the studium: the broad field of cultural, political, and ethical interest that a viewer recognizes through education, from the Latin for "application to a thing." He names the second the punctum: a detail that rises unbidden from the scene to wound or pierce the viewer, from the Latin for a prick or puncture.

Barthes elaborates the studium by examining Photography's cultural functions: to inform, to represent, to surprise, to signify, and to provoke desire. He introduces the concept of the "mask," the social and historical meaning a face carries, discussing Richard Avedon's portrait of William Casby, a man who was born into slavery, as an example where the mask lays bare the essence of slavery. A photograph entirely governed by the studium, with no punctum to disturb it, Barthes calls "unary": It transforms reality without doubling it. News photographs and pornographic photographs are typically unary. The erotic photograph, by contrast, is a pornographic image disturbed by a secondary element that breaks its homogeneity.

He details the punctum through specific examples: the strapped pumps worn by a woman in James Van der Zee's 1926 family portrait, a child's bad teeth in a William Klein photograph, and Tristan Tzara's unclean fingernails in a portrait by André Kertész. The punctum must not be intentional; it has a metonymic power of expansion, meaning a single detail triggers a wider chain of personal associations. Barthes compares its effect to the haiku: Both produce an intense immobility that does not invite rhetorical expansion. The punctum also creates a "blind field" beyond the photograph's frame, endowing the image with a life outside its borders. Part One closes with Barthes acknowledging that pleasure alone has not revealed Photography's essential nature. He must descend deeper, into the territories of love and death.

Part Two opens in grief. One November evening after his mother's death, Barthes sorts through photographs of her, recognizing fragments but never her essential being. History separates him from her earlier pictures; perishable clothing and accessories create what he calls a second grave for the loved person. Then he discovers the Winter Garden Photograph: a faded sepia print showing his mother at age five and her brother at seven, standing in a glassed-in conservatory at the family house in Chennevières-sur-Marne. In this image, he rediscovers his mother completely, what he calls "the assertion of a gentleness" (69). He compares the experience to Marcel Proust's involuntary memory and declares the photograph "the impossible science of the unique being" (70). He declines to reproduce the image in the book: For any other viewer, it would be merely an indifferent picture. During his mother's final illness, Barthes nursed her, and she became his "little girl," a reversal that united the dying woman with the essential child of the photograph.

This discovery anchors Barthes's deepest claims. He formulates Photography's noeme, its essential characteristic: Every photograph certifies that its referent was once placed before the lens. He calls this "That-has-been." Unlike painting, which can feign reality, or language, whose referents can be imaginary, Photography superimposes reality and the past. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent: Light from a real body touched the photographic surface, creating what Barthes calls "a sort of umbilical cord" (81) between the depicted thing and the viewer's gaze. Photography's power of authentication exceeds its power of representation; the photograph is a "certificate of presence" (87).

Barthes contrasts the photograph's arrested time with cinema's protensive quality, its forward temporal momentum. The photograph is full and melancholy, "without future"; cinema moves forward and is therefore not melancholic. He describes the photograph as "undialectical": It cannot transform grief into mourning. He introduces a second kind of punctum, distinct from the detail of Part One. This new punctum is Time itself. In Alexander Gardner's 1865 portrait of Lewis Payne, a young man awaiting execution, Barthes reads simultaneously "this will be" and "this has been." The photograph tells death in the future. Looking at his mother as a child, he tells himself she is going to die, shuddering over a catastrophe that has already occurred. Every photograph, he concludes, is this catastrophe.

In the book's final reflections, Barthes explores the concept of the "air," a quality beyond resemblance that transmits something of the subject's soul. Photography's flat surface cannot be penetrated by scrutiny: Enlargement reveals only the grain of the paper, not the being one seeks. Barthes connects Photography to a potential madness, an identification of reality with truth that pushes affect to what the philosopher Julia Kristeva calls la vérité folle, or mad truth. Society tames this madness by two means: first, by elevating Photography to an art, subjecting it to aesthetic codes that neutralize its noeme; second, by mass proliferation, banalizing images until they lose their singular force. The book closes with a choice for the viewer: to subject the photograph to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.