La Chambre Claire - Roland Barthes.
In 1980 Roland Barthes wrote La cambre Claire translated Camera Lucida. The book was a personal and sentimental essay into his perception of photography and the photograph itself, an emotional journey which found him searching for the true essence of a photograph or as Barthes calls it the "Punctum", our very own trigger within a photograph which is unique to each individual, Barthes records this as being "Fascination? No, this photograph which i pick out and which I love has nothing in common with the shiny point which sways before your eyes and makes your head swim; what it produces in me is the very opposite of herbitude; something more like an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labour too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken..."
Barthes within camera Lucida then goes on to describe the moment he realised when particular photographs had a punctum for him. Namely the images of:
These images gave Barthes cause to pause and he realised they attracted him as they had a "kind of duality..." he describes the above photograph as "Here on a torn up pavement, a child's corpse undo a white sheet; parents and friends stand around it, desolate: a banal enough scene, unfortunately, but I noted certain inferences: the corpse's one bare foot, the sheet carried by a weeping mother (why this sheet?), a woman in the background, probably a friend holding a handkerchief to her nose."
In 1980 Roland Barthes wrote La cambre Claire translated Camera Lucida. The book was a personal and sentimental essay into his perception of photography and the photograph itself, an emotional journey which found him searching for the true essence of a photograph or as Barthes calls it the "Punctum", our very own trigger within a photograph which is unique to each individual, Barthes records this as being "Fascination? No, this photograph which i pick out and which I love has nothing in common with the shiny point which sways before your eyes and makes your head swim; what it produces in me is the very opposite of herbitude; something more like an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labour too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken..."
Barthes within camera Lucida then goes on to describe the moment he realised when particular photographs had a punctum for him. Namely the images of:
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| Koen Weesing Nicaragua. 1979 |
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| Koen Wessing: Nicaragua. 1979 |
Barthes realised these images held something for him, which he did not find in Wessings other photographs of Nicaragua.
Barthes felt there was a written rule for viewing a photograph and decided to name and give structure to this rule. He decided a photograph contains "Studium an Punctum." Studium is the content of a photograph, the interest, what initially draws you to the image, be it the geography, structure, faces, gestures or the actions, it is a taste for the photograph. The second element Barthes describes as the punctum "... this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument" He feels he photographs are punctuated with sensitive points "Sting, speck, cut, little hole- and also the cast of a dice." Photographs to Barthes can be one or the other and sometimes both.
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