History of Photography

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Roland Barthes and the snapshot

Douglas R. Nickel

To cite this article: Douglas R. Nickel (2000) Roland Barthes and the snapshot, History of
Photography, 24:3, 232-235, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2000.10443413

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 Roland Barthes and the Snapshot
Douglas R. Nickel
In ~ 980, a few months after completing the manuS<.-ript for his
semmal study La Chombre Claire: Note sur Ia photographie (translated
into English as Camera Lucida: Rejkctions on Photography), the French
philosopher Roland Barthes stepped off a Parisian street comer and
was killed by a passing laundry van. He was sixty-five at the time,
hardly an old man, but any reader of Camera Lucida would have to
conclude that 'untimely' is not a word as straightforwardly applied
to this fatality as it might have been to that of another author; for,
disconcertingly, Barthes's last statement on the photographic
medium is rife with thoughts about death and mortality - his
own, and that of those he loved. It is in tact a theory of death
offered in the guise of a critical analysis, one professedly aroused by
the deeply felt loss of his mother just prior to its formulation, but
moreover inscribed with meditations on the phenomenology of the
writer's own existence and implied demise. At the emotional centre
of this disquisition lies a single object: a photograph of his mother
when still a child that Barthes finds in her things after her funeral.
Whether presentiment, self-destruction, or mere unhappy accident
relate the two circumstances, Camera Lucida has the uncanny effect
of rendering its author's actual death a somewhat prosaic confirma-
~on of his th_eoretical one, while at the same time elevating this
single hermenc and rather unremarkable family document to the
posthumous status of cultural icon. Barthes's study is worthy of re-
examination in the present context not only because of its stature as
the most sustained and thoughtful contemplation of a vernacular
photograph extant in the literature - drawing response from critics
as diverse as Victor Burgin, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jacques Derrida, and
Susan Sontag - but also because, in demonstrating his impassioned
reading of this personal memento, the author elaborated a
hermeneutic model that opens up possibilities for analysis of a
much greater range of non-art objects and practices than has
he_retofore been the province of traditional photographic history. In
this model the snapshot assumes a gravity all the more considerable
for its indeterminacy and lack of intention, a key not only to
Barthes's individual aesthetic but also to the poststructuralist
position into which his work metamorphosed over time.
Oddly, until Camera Lucida, the photograph per se was not an
object that especially interested the writer. Although appearing with
regularity in essays throughout his oeuvre, photography as a subject
was always invoked as the weft running across the fabric of some
other discussion. If the writer's career is characterized as having
three distinct phases, as Jean-Michel Rabate has suggested - an
early, Saussurean structuralist phase of nco-Marxist cultural
journalism; a middle period devoted to the idea of textual
'pleasure', which followed Barthes's trip to Japan in 1966 and his
first exposure to Derrida's writings; and a late, poststructuralist
period of increasing scepticism and autobiographical self-
involvement - then it makes little sense to speak of an 'evolution'
to his thought on the subject: before Camera Lucid4, photography
was merely a kind of example to cite in support of some other
argument. 1 Indeed, the topics Barthes generally gravitated to -
literary texts, music, theatre, poetry, fashion, food, the language of
232 HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, VOLUME 24, NUMBER 3, AUTUMN 2000
lovers, writing itself- are indicated by their demonstrably conven-
tional, socially constructed nature: their anti-naturalism. The
philosopher admitted an intellectual aversion to cultural forms that
?pera_ted too directly by implicit resemblance, by analogy, as he puts
tt, gotng so tar once as to identify them as his btte noire:
The 'analogic' arts (cinema, photography), the 'analogic'
methods (academic criticism) are discredited [for Barthes].
Why? Because analogy implies an effect of Nature: it
constitutes the 'Natural' as a source of truth; and what adds to
the curse of analogy is the fact that it is irrepressible; no
sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something, i.e., in
the long run, Nature. Whence the effort of painters, of
writers, to escape it. How? By two contrary excesses, or call
them ironies which flout Analogy, either by feigning a specta-
cularly flat respect (this is the Copy, which is rescued) or by
regularly - according to the regulations - distorting the
imitated object (this is Anamorphosis).
Aside from these transgressions, what stands in beneficent
opposition to perfidious Analogy is simple structural
correspondence: Homology, which reduces the recall of the
first subject to a proportional allusion (etymologically, i.e., in
the Edenic state of language, analogy used to mean
proportion).
(The bull sees red when his lure falls under his nose; the
two reds coincide, that of rage and that of the cape: the bull is
caught in analogy, i.e., in the imaginary. When I resist
analogy, it is actually the imaginary I am resisting: which is to
say: the coalescence of the sign, the similitude of signifier and
signified, the homeomorphism of images, the Mirror, the
captivating bait. All scientific explanations which resort to
analogy - and they are legion - participate in the lure, they
form the image-repertory ofScience.) 2
Barthes's antipathy for the snare of reflection recalls Siegfried
Kracauer's 1927 critique of historicist thinking, which similarly
aligned the photograph with a facile but ultimately untrustworthy
'natural' understanding of history as the product of real-world
occurrences:
Historicist thinking . . . emerged at about the same time as
modem photographic technology. On the whole, advocates of
historicist thinking believe they can explain any phenomenon
purely in terms of its genesis. That is, they believe in any case
that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the
course of events in their temporal succession without any
gaps. Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism
seeks to provide the temporal continuum. According to
historicism, the complete mirroring of an intratemporal
sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that
occurred within that time. 3
Kracauer objects to the 'scientific' conception of history compre-
hended in historicism fur the same reason Barthes avoids the
0308-7298/00 C 2000 Taylor & Francis ltd.
 Roland Barthes and the Snapshot

analogic: the authority of reflection too readily masks the If Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way
constructed aspect of such representations, making them resistant of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who
to analysis, in effect transparent to it. Language, an arbitrary system, sees it): hy way of Death. We know the original relation of the
allows one the space to think; the photograph, in this conception, Theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated
works to short-circuit thought hy allowing the imagination to pass themselves from the community by playing the role of the
right through it. 4 It was the adventure of Camera Lucida to restore Dead ... it is this same relation which I find in the
opacity to the photograph, even if this meant recanting semiolo- Photograph; however 'lifelike' we sttive to make it (and this
gical ideas about it that Barthes propounds in his own earlier frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an
writings. apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive
If the book is not the culminating chapter in an ongoing theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a ftguration of the motionless
project to understand photography, it is very much an instalment in and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. 10
another project, the autobiographical one that appears at the end of
Barthes's career and includes Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by It is this staging of oneself as dead, the spectral dissociation of
Roland Barthes, 'Deliberation' (his last published essay) and, to an consciousness from identity that betokens the theatre of the
extent, A Lover's Discourse. All of these writings might be said to photograph for him. The perforrnative image - his own
involve the author's struggle with the problem of historical self- performance in photographs (or journal writing, or autobiography)
inscription, the need to sort out and recover if possible an authentic - gives back nothing but the generalized image of culture enacted
self from the various manners of posing that most presentational through individual bodies, and so, for Barthes, this aspect of
forms assume. In 'Deliberation', Barthes negotiates what he calls the photography falls outside the real.
'artifice of sincerity' that attends writing in a personal journal or What is real for Barthes is feeling, qffect. Many readers of
diary; in A Lover's Discourse he meditates upon the codes of signifi- Camera Lucida have been led to see in this text the author's
cation that embody our expressions of emotion ('By weeping, I definitive attempt to theorize an 'essence' to photography, and
want to impress someone, to bring pressure to bear on someone'). 5 Barthes's elliptical logic and rhetorical subdety certainly facilitate
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), the author's late experiment such misreading. The essay opens with the admission of an
in memoir, is closest to Camera Lucida in its preoccupations - the '"ontological" desire', to learn 'at all costs what Photography was
two texts are in fact interdependent to a large extent, with many of "in itself"' (p. 3), and after a lengthy process of elimination, its
the themes of the latter rehearsed, in more explicit form, in the narrator finally believes he has discovered it in one specific image:
earlier work. Where Camera Lucida takes the form of a confession, the 1898 photograph of his mother and her brother as children,
and is therefore narrative in sttategy, Roland Barthes is entirely taken in a glass conservatory in their hometown of Chenneviares-
aphoristic in structure: it is rendered as a catalogue of subject~, sur-Marne, which he refers to thereafter as the Winter Garden
concepts, and autobiographical fragments, with a third-person Photograph. Following a Nietzschean method of subjective
narrator commenting on their consequence to a rhetorical figure induction oudined earlier in the book, Barthes is led to conclude
11

identified as either 'he' or 'R. B'. Barthes begins the exercise with 'something like the essence of the Photograph ftoated in this
the handwritten line 'It must all be considered as if spoken by a particular picture', and that he would hence '"derive" all
character in a novel', and later summarizes: 'At the crossroads of the Photography (its "nature")' from it (p. 73). He goes on to consider
entire oeuvre, perhaps the Theater: there is not a single one of his what precisely about the image he so clearly identified with his
texts, in fact, which fails to deal with a certain theater, and spectacle mother, and reasons in due course that what he sees there is her
is the universal category in whose aspect the world is scen'. 6 In so gentleness, a kindness which 'had formed her immediately and
far as Barthes recognizes himself as both player in and observer of forever' yet 'belongs to no system'. 'This extreme and particular
an existence that is above all else a kind of representation, the stakes circumstance', he concludes, 'so absttact in relation to an image,
for Roland Barthes and for Camera Lucida are the same: to consider was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had
the possibility of something authentic, irreducible, prior to just discovered.... For once, photography gave me a sentiment as
representation or the learned habits of posture. certain as remembrance' (pp. 69-70).
Thus the sensitive description Barthes gives us in Camera Barthes's excitement at this discovery promptly turns to pathos,
Lucida of sitting for the camera ('Once I feel myself observed by the however, as the perceived being of his mother - present in the
lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of image, absent in reality- slips away. 'In front of the photograph of
"posing", I instantaneously make another body for myself, I my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder,
ttansform myself in advance into an image') 7 extends a commentary like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has
begun in Roland Barthes, where a portfolio of anonymous snapshots already occurred'. From this he generalizes: 'Whether or not the
showing the author at various ages is accompanied by a text that subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe' (p. 96).
read~: Hence the quality Barthes identifies as photography's essence,
its noeme: he asserts a condition of necessary presence - specifically,
'But I never looked like that!' - How do you know? What is a past presence - distinguishes it from any other system of
the 'you' you might or might not look like? Where do you representation, a technological encoding of the future anterior.
tind it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Such condition displaces the more rudimentary notion of the index
Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can through its superimposition of temporal duration upon actuality, its
never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes shifi: in tense to past perfect (the 'this-has-been'), making the
unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or photograph's sovereignty not a question of transcriptive exactitude
the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they but of reality-in-time. The distinction is important: Barthes is
look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are arguing this essence to be located not in the object itself, but in the
condemned to the repertoire of its images. 8 process of its cognition by a viewer. The sensation he describes is
This is the chaff the later book endeavours to winnow from not one of indexical authority or legibility, but of disorientation and
photography, as its author sees his portrait caught in an overlapping madness- the 'vertigo of time defeated', a 'temporal hallucination'
series of pretences: 'the one I think I am, the one I want others to - as distinct orders of time collide in perceptual simultaneity.
think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am', and so on, It would be naive to assume, however, that Barthes has much
leading him to despair that 'each time I am (or let myself be) at stake in the taxonomy of this definition. The terms he initially
photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sets off in quotation marks (an 'ontological' desire, photography 'in
sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares)'. 9 From itself, its 'nature') signal the deployment of what the text refers to
this insight, Barthes concludes that the origins of photography for as a 'casual phenomenology', one that pretends no utility outside
him lie not in painting, but in drama, and antecedent to that, in the rhetorical licence it grants the author to derive his real subject.
death: The crucial passage reads:

233
Douglas R. Nickel
In this investigation of Photography, I borrowed something
from phenomenology's project and something from its
language. But it is a vague, casual, even cynical phenomen-
ology, so readily did it agree to distort or to evade its
principles according to the whim of my desire. First of all, I
did not escape, or try to escape, from a paradox: on the one
hand the desire to give a name to Photography's essence and
then to sketch an eidetic science of the Photograph; and on
the other the intractable feeling that Photography is essentially
(a contradiction in terms) only contingency, singularity, risk:
my photographs would always participate, as Lyotard says, in
'something or other': is it not the very weakness of
Photography, this difficulty in existing which we call banality?
Next, my phenomenology agreed to compromise with a
power, qffect: affect was what I didn't want to reduce; being
irreducible, it was thereby what I wanted, what I ought to
reduce the Photograph to; but could I retain an affective
intentionality, a view of the object which was immediately
steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria? Classical
phenomenology, the kind I had known in my adolescence
(and there has not been any other since), had never, so fur as I
could remember, spoken of desire or of mourning. Of course
I could make out in Photography, in a very orthodox manner,
a whole network of essences (deriving, for instance, from
aesthetics, from History, from sociology): but at the moment
of reaching the essence of Photography in general, I branched
ofT; instead of following the path of a formal ontology (of a
Logic), I stopped, keeping with me, like a treasure, my desire
or my grief; the anticipated essence of the Photograph could
not, in my mind, be separated from the 'pathos' of which,
from the first glance, it consists. I was like that friend who had
turned to Photography only because it allowed him to
photograph his son. As Spectator I was interested in
Photography only for 'sentimental' reasons; I wanted to
explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I
feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think. 12
Barthes sets up this paradox - naming an essence he admits does
not exist - as an enabling device; he knows the photograph is
reducible (by aesthetics, by history, by sociology) but wants to
claim sentiment is not. The narrator discovers authenticity, his
'degree zero', here alone: in desire, in love, in the maternal, in acute
suffering and loss. In a manoeuvre typical of his late phase, the
philosopher builds a system useless for any other purpose than to
point to his own unsystematizable emotions, an alibi for dis~
his grief into one final term, which he calls the madness of Pity. 1
Whether or not a phenomenology of affect is conceivable
(irreducible? might not emotion simply represent a new manifesta-
tion of Nature in this scheme?), we can be certain that photography
is not the paramount subject here, but only a reification. Its
function for Barthes is that of catalyst, integral to a perceptual
alchemy he is manifestly at pains not to dispel.
Understanding this metaphysical impulse in Camera Lucida
helps illuminate another of its features sometimes confused with
system. Barthes offers the terms studium and punctum in the first half
of the book as a way to distinguish between the public and private
in a photograph. The 'studium' he identifies as the general interest
aroused by an image, the facets we learn to discern culturally,
through training and literacy; this aspect, he insists, entails
connotation, apprehension of the intentions of the photographer,
the limited gratification that comes from recognition. The
'punctum', on the other hand, is a disturbance to this field, some
detail in the image that unexpectedly pricks the emotions and
disconcerts the intelligibility of its cultural semantics. (Barthes
points to the straps of a woman's pumps in one photograph, a
child's bad teeth in another, as examples.) The punctum exerts a
power that is impossible to generalize: it is immediate, subjective,
not reducible to language. As Derrida has pointed out, 'sn1dium'
and 'punctum' are not binary terms: the punctum supplements the
studium, may or may not be present in any particular photograph,
and it is different for every viewer. 14
234
The punctum is ultimately an effect of photographic reading,
and Camera Lucida might logically be seen as an extension into
photography of Barthes's theory of the text. The distinction
between studium and punctum, for instance, bears no uncertain
resemblance to the contrast Barthes makes in The Pleasure cfthe Text
(1973) between two kinds of reading response- plaisir, the general
pleasure of understanding and participation, and jouissana, the
excessive, ecstatic kind that discomforts, shocks, unsertles, or
'abrades'. 15 Such response does not derive from any purpose of the
author or photographer: affective details for Barthes are uninten-
tional, an excess of the work, what Barthes calls the 'subde beyond'
that reasserts (as he had earlier announced in S/Z and 'The Death
of the Author') the reader as producer of meaning in the text. The
shock of discovering in the Winter Garden photograph the
emblematic gendeness of his mother's face comes from just such
reading, a reading so unique and personal that Barthes decides
reproducing the picture in Camera Lucida to be a gesture wasted on
his necessarily uncomprehending audience. 16
The style of photographic reading Barthes demonstrates - in
contrast with his approach in the Mythologies period - does
nothing so much as circle back upon the individuality of the
observer, to a place where criticism lapses into irrelevance. The
cultural politics of the early Barthes mandated critique of the more
public, professional forms of photography, such as those used in
advertising or journalism, but the later writer recognized that the
affective consciousness he wished to engage answered in inverse
proportion to the degree of finesse and deliberation a photograph
demonstrated. This is why Barthes shows so lirtle interest in art
photography. 'Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state
of the artist: someone who cannot - or will not - achieve the
mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it
is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the
professional: for it is he who stands closer to the notmt of
Photography' (pp. 98-99). Art photography, in filet, is not simply
an inferior category of the medium, but its undoing: Camera Lucida
culminates with Banhes's final political statement, in which he rails
against what he calls society's 'taming' of photography. He laments
the photograph's 'madness' - its salient characteristic for him -
gerting domesticated by society, either through a repetition and
image saturation that banalizes our response to human conflict and
desire, or through its being made art, where its mad noeme is
di1fused or forgotten. The snapshots in his &mily album retain their
madness because, more than any other documents he has found,
they can transport him to the limits of his metaphysics: to the
unrecoverable essence of his mother's love, to the barely imaginable
time that preceded his own existence, and above all, to the 'flat',
meaningless death he knows was her fate and will be his as well.
Camera Lucida is the terminus of Barthes's critical project, a last
wilful act of terrorism, not because he did not live to continue it,
but because there was no place left to take it. The final object of
deconstruction - his very existence - Barthes met with a
remarkable exercise in the writing of consciousness, one that
remains apt not so much for its treatment of photography, but for
its recognition of how that subject bears upon the problem ofbeing
human.
More than any other writer on the medium, Barthes
recognized how, as an object of interpretation, the snapshot is
caught between private function and public meaning. The Winter
Garden photograph made itself available to his analysis in part
because it was unmotivated, coming into existence for no other
reason than to memorialize a moment in the lives of two ordinary
children, and in pan because Barthes carried personal information
and feeling within him - supplemental information - that was
readily fastened to details in the image that would have remained
indeterminate to any other viewer. At the same time, he
demonstrates the same reading process extended to other images -
to snapshots, other vernacular photographs, and even art
photography - to illustrate how the polysemic attributes of the
camera image render it something like a haiku, to be completed
subjectively, without reference to a tacit standard of right or wrong,

in the imagination of the beholder. This emphasis on reception, as
opposed to traditional history's privileging of intentionality and the
conditions of production, undermines the interpretive presump-
tions upon which most photographic criticism heretofore has been
founded, and the object classifications that have bolstered them for
the past hundred years. A history of photography after Barthes (if
one would even call it that) might well be radically reoriented
towards the vernacular, and might, a~ such, retain some of the
political 'madness' he held in esteem.
Notes
1. Jean-Michel Rabare. 'Introduction', in Writing the lm4ge After Roktnd
Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabatc, Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press 1997, 1-16.
2. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland &rthes, trans. Richard
Howard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1994
(1975], 44. Rabare notes Barthes's indebtedness to Sartre for his
understanding of the 'imaginary' realm of subjective illusion (Barthes
dedicates Camera Lucida 'In Homage to L'lm4ginaire by Jean-Paul
Sartre'), and to Jacques Lacan for the idea of the 'image-repertoire'. See
Rabate, 1-2.
3. Sigfiied Kracauer, 'Photography', The Mass Ornament: Wtim4r Ess4ys.
[1927], trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press 1995, 49-50.
4. Rabare, 1.
5. 'Deliberation' [ 1979] and excerpts from A Lover's Discourse [1977] are
reproduced in Susan Sontag (ed.), A Bartlu:s Reader, New York: Hill &
Wang 1982, 479-95 and 426-56, respectively. The semantic contlation
of Barthes's dissatisfilction with his journal entries and the record-
keeping of photography is made manifest in his choice of metaphor:
'Then comes the second phase, very soon after the first (for instance, if I
reread today what I wrote yesterday), and it makes a bad impression: the
text doesn't hold up, like some son of delicate foodstuff which "turns",
spoils, becomes unappetizing from one day to the next' ('Deliberation',
479); 'Photography is unclassifiable because there is no rea.~on to mark
this or dtat of its occurrences . . . deprived of the principle of marking,
photographs are signs which don't take, which turn, as milk does'
(Camtm Lucida, 6).
6. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 177.
7. Camtm Lucida, 10.
8. Roland Barthes by Roland Bartlu:s, 36-44.
Roland Barthes and the Snapshot
9. Camtm Lucida, 13.
10. Camera Lucida, 31-2.
11. 'I then decided that this disorder and this dilenuna, revealed to me by
my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had
always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two
languages, one expressive, the other critical .... It was better, once and
for all, to make my protestation of singularity into a virtue - to try
making what Nietzsche called the "ego's ancient sovereignty" into an
heuristic principle. So I resolved to start my inquiry with no more than a
few photographs, the ones I was sure existed for me' (Camera Lucida, 8).
12. Camera Lucida, 20-1.
13. Barthes inaugurates hi• discussion of CamenJ Lucida's method with an
avowal of one thing only: 'a desperate resistance to any reductive system'
p. (8). In Roland Barthes, he elaborates on the use of paradox as one tactic
of such resistance: 'Reactive fOrmations: a Doxa (a popular opinion) is
posited, intolerable; to free myself of it, I postulate a paradox; then this
paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion, itself becomes a new
Doxa, and I must seek fitrther for a new paradox' (p. 7 l) .
14. Jacques Derrida, 'The Deaths of Roland Banhes', Philosophy and Non-
Philosophy Since Merltau-Ponty, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, Chicago:
Northwestern University Press 1997,285.
15. 'I await the fragment that will concern me and establish meaning for
me'. Roland Barthes, Lt Plaisir du ta~ (1973) [The Pleasure I( the
Tat], trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill & Wang 1975, 58. The
idea of intense emotion as a disturbance to the psychic field is played
out again in A Lows Discourse, in particularly optical terms:
'Anything is likely to ravish me which can reach me through a ring,
a rip, a rent: "The first time I saw X through a car window: the
window shifted, like a lens searching out who to love in the crowd;
and then - immobilized by some accuracy of my desire? - I
focused on that apparition whom I was henceforth to follow for
months ... "' (p. 437).
16. Interestingly, Barthes had previously reproduced sever.&! snapshots of his
mother at different ages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, as well as
early portraits of himself, his filther and his grandparents. In a rehearsal of
the Winter Garden photograph's exegesis, Barthes comments on a
snapshot of himself as a toddler: 'From the past, it is my childhood
which filscinates me most; these images alone, upon inspection, fail to
make me regret the time which has vanished. For it is not the irrever-
sible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which
is still in me, by fits and starts; in the child, I read quite openly the dark
underside of myself- boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despairs
(in the plural, fOrtunately), inward excitement, cut (unfortunately) from
all expression' (p. 22).
235