Camera Lucida

Alexander Gardner – Portrait of  Lewis Payne 

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
by Roland Barthes

      I will start by saying I did not like this book when I started reading it. Roland Barthes did not seam to have a clear direction on what he was saying and did not have seem to have a good reason to be writing about this topic. But as I continued reading it became clear that Roland was writing in order to solve his own intellectual dilemma of why he was attracted to some photographs and not others, and not a 'how to see photographs.' Once I established this for myself I quite enjoyed the book.
     Camera Lucida gives a rare look at photography from the view point of the viewer (none artist, none critic  ,none photographer). Barthes does not describe how a photographers should take a photograph but simply explores what he himself is drawn to or repealed by in a photograph. Barthes breaks the photograph in to parts. The operator is the photographer, the spectator is himself, the studium is general information that a photograph expresses, and the punctum; the thing that makes the spectator feel something (being punctured).
     The author explains that every photograph has the first three elements but the photographs that have punctum are the ones that become something more. now I will say that Barthes punctums and mine differ in many areas but that would be true with the punctums nature. In other words the punctum is what my life full of experience and relations tells me what to relate to in this photograph.

      some quotes that I fell i should take from this book

"society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise... hence the photograph whose meaning ( im not saying its effect, but its meaning) is too impressive is quickly deflected."

" the voice of banality ( to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of the singularity ( to replenish such banality with the elan of an emotion which belonged only to me) it was as if I were seeking the nature of a verb which had no infinitive, only tense and mode."

"All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of death."

-Roland Barthes