Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (London: Methuen, 1982)Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982)

1983 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-110
Author(s):  
Tim Clark
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Camera Lucida

scholarly journals El fracaso de la fotografía: una respuesta intermedial al programa fenomenológico de camera lucida de Roland Barthes

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (19) ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
Alfredo Lèal
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Camera Lucida

El presente artículo pretende dar cuenta de las limitantes de la propuesta teórica de Roland Barthes para analizar la fotografía en tanto ésta se considere a la luz del programa fenomenológico del filósofo francés. Dada la importancia de la teoría de Barthes en el campo de la fotografía, creemos  que dichas limitantes sólo son perceptibles si el programa de Barthes se lee desde una postura intermedial, es decir, desde la relación que la fotografía —en tanto re-presentación material de la realidad— presupone y desarrolla en torno a sí con respecto a instancias histórico-mediáticas que se encuentran en contradicción a las esencias regionales reconocidas por Barthes, tal como lo intentamos hacer en el presente trabajo. De esta forma, la fotografía se presenta como un suplemento que pretende colmar, materialmente, la realidad. Un suplemento que, tanto en su constitución como en sus consecuencias, se basa en un sustrato metafísico, a saber, el aparecimiento absoluto o absoluto aparecimiento del objeto fotografiado.

scholarly journals The Theatricality of the Punctum: Re-Viewing Camera Lucida

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Robert Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Photo Essay ◽  
A Performance

I first encountered Roland Barthes�s Camera Lucida�(1980) in 2012 when I was developing a performance on falling and photography. Since then I have re-encountered Barthes�s book annually as part of my practice-as-research PhD project on the relationships between performance and photography. This research project seeks to make performance work in response to Barthes�s book � to practice with Barthes in an exploration of theatricality, materiality and affect. This photo-essay weaves critical discourse with performance documentation to explore my relationship to Barthes�s book. Responding to Michael Fried�s claim that Barthes�s Camera Lucida is an exercise in �antitheatrical critical thought� (Fried 2008, 98) the essay seeks to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida. Specifically, by exploring Barthes�s conceptualisation of the pose I discuss how performance practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in Barthes�s text. Additionally, I argue for Barthes�s book as an example of philosophy as performance and for my own work as an instance of performance philosophy.

scholarly journals When the Image Takes over the Real: Holography and Its Potential within Acts of Visual Documentation

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Angela Bartram
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
The Real ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Ephemeral Art ◽  
Real Essence

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discusses the capacity of the photographic image to represent “flat death”. Documentation of an event, happening, or time is traditionally reliant on the photographic to determine its ephemeral existence and to secure its legacy within history. However, the traditional photographic document is often unsuitable to capture the real essence and experience of the artwork in situ. The hologram, with its potential to offer a three-dimensional viewpoint, suggests a desirable solution. However, there are issues concerning how this type of photographic document successfully functions within an art context. Attitudes to methods necessary for artistic production, and holography’s place within the process, are responsible for this problem. The seductive qualities of holography may be attributable to any failure that ensues, but, if used precisely, the process can be effective to create a document for ephemeral art. The failures and successes of the hologram to be reliable as a document of experience are discussed in this article, together with a suggestion of how it might undergo a transformation and reactivation to become an artwork itself.

scholarly journals Towards a psychopathology of opera

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
Optical Unconscious ◽  
Saturated Medium

Roland Barthes discusses a postmodern condition in his last book, Camera Lucida: everything is signified and visible, and everything has the flatness of the photographic image; even death is rendered platitudinous, flat. If everything can be represented, nothing can be represented that would distinguish it from the mass of images already available; and if everything is for consumption in conditions of distraction, then difference disappears; we are left in a state Barthes calls ‘indifference’. Barthes then looks for the punctum: any point of unrepresentability that will punctuate or pierce the smoothness of the studium (art marked out by completeness, by total visibility). The punctum, by its wounding quality, would be a signifier pointing to something outside representation, outside the studium, and inasmuch as opera in the condition of postmodernism is likely to be a saturated medium, absorbed by viewers and listeners in conditions of distraction, the question arises, what punctum could it bear? There is, of course, nothing that could be isolated as such: it is, rather, that which by being outside representation appeals to what might be called–adapting Walter Benjamin's sense of photography as pointing to an ‘optical unconscious’ – an ‘aural unconscious’ just outside the text.

Theaters of Pain: Violence and Photography

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-721
Author(s):  
Gabriela Nouzeilles
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Human Eye ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Extreme Violence

The Photograph is violent.—Roland Barthes, Camera LucidaWho are you, who will look at these photographs, and by what right, and what will you do about it?—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous MenIn His Entry for Eye in Le Dictionnaire Critique (1929-30), Georges Bataille Refers to the Human Compulsion to Look as a response to a “blind thirst for blood,” triggered by the spectacle of extreme violence, including torture. But why, Bataille wonders, would someone's “absurd eyes be attracted, like a cloud of flies, to something so repugnant?” (19). He attributes to the human eye the cannibalistic disposition that comes from our “inexplicable acuity of horrors” and from the disturbing fascination that the eye itself exerts over our sensibility. The extreme seductiveness of the eye, Bataille hints, is probably “at the very edge of horror” (17). He connects the unstable edge that separates such contradictory responses with the idea of the eye as a critical tool, in which “critical” refers to the act of discerning and the act of cutting—as shown in the infamous opening of Tuis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's film Un chien andalou (“An Andalusian Dog” [1929]), when the eye of a young woman is sliced open by a razor in front of the camera. This violence against embodied (and sexualized) vision points not only to the notion of the eye as a misleading mimetic apparatus but also to the image of the eye as a hole or gap. The split eye is resignified as ocular replication, which, unexpectedly, triggers the proliferation of images and the loss of sight that come from seeing too much. Indeed, the swarm of eyes that populates Bataille's visual imagery grimly alludes to the compulsion to watch violent acts to the point of blindness.

Barthes avec Derrida, ou vers un après-punctum social et écologique

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Eliza Dana Coroamă
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Photographic Image

In “Camera Lucida”, Roland Barthes comes into a personal and autobiographical exploration of photography, trying to grasp the sharp and piercing emotion which he terms punctum. Defying signs and codes, the punctum leads to an irreducible subjective experience of the photographic image as that-has-been. Reading Roland Barthes’s theory of photography through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s essays on mourning and otherness, this article questions whether the notion of punctum can have a social and political meaning.

NOISY FIELD EXPOSURES, or what comes before attunement

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-664
Author(s):  
Vickie Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Methodological Principle ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Photo Essay ◽  
Regional Australia ◽  
Country Town

Before attunement comes exposure, the necessary fact of being a body. This photo essay is a play on two meanings of the word exposure: corporeal exposure and photographic exposure. I offer the latter in order to stay with moments of the former, exposing multiple scenes of misattunement from fieldwork in a small country town in regional Australia. Picking up the classic distinction in information theory between signal and noise, this piece pauses at the moment of indeterminacy before an event might be affirmed as valuable signal or discarded as unwanted static, weaving stories and images from the field with excerpts from Michel Serres’ The Parasite, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Paul Harrison’s essay on Corporeal Remains. Ultimately, this essay’s suggestion is that ‘attunement’ is not primarily about attunement. Instead, as a methodological principle, I offer that attunement initially – and sufficiently – gestures towards an attempt, a vulnerability and a commitment to the event of exposure.

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