Roland Barthes on photography MESSAGECODE signifer (representation)signified (meaning) denotationconnotation photographcaption obvious or informationalsymbolic.

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).