© Alexander Gardner | Lewis Paine, 1865
The eidos of photography
Roland Barthes
The essence of photography according to Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was not only the first philosopher to apply semiology to photography; he was also the first to bid semiology farewell again. Camera Lucida, the last book he wrote, is a return to the method condemned by semiologists: phenomenology, in search of the essence of photography. This essence was summed up by Barthes as ‘that-has-been’. Various criticisms have been made against this definition, but why did Barthes adhere to objectivity in photography?
Although the French subtitle of Camera Lucida is 'note sur la photographie', the book can be better considered a mystical search for the deceased mother of the author, in which photography serves as a medium: the via fotografica.
Although the photograph of Barthes' mother, on which he murmurously meditated, becomes a topic only in the second part, in the first part one can already feel the tension of a longing for a mystical union with the object of the photograph. It sounds more like an excuse when, at the end of part one, Barthes says that he still hasn’t found the essence of photography and therefore uses photographs of his recently deceased mother as a new guideline. He doesn’t 'really' meet her in any of these photographs until he discovers a photograph of her at the age of five.
Phenomenology
“I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naïve attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding herself, and finally her expression, which distinguished her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup - all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence.” 1
This photograph of his mother in the Jardin d'Hiver became, for him, the mediator of a truth. It was essential and fulfilled for Barthes, in a utopian way, 'the impossible Science of the unique being’. It genuinely brought him back to his mother, bridged time and history, and broke through the web of Maya (illusion). Through the photograph, he understood that the eidos - the essence of photography - is the Real and the True.
Obviously, such a personal and subjective approach to photography could not have been inspired by semiology. Already at the beginning of the book, Barthes reveals that he wants to go in a different direction. As in earlier texts on literature (e.g. in Le plaisir du texte), he was inspired by phenomenology. The basis of the phenomenological method, founded by Husserl, is the so-called 'eidetic reduction'. With this, the researcher tries to put between brackets all his interpretations and knowledge about the object, observing only how the object appears in his consciousness. When the reduction is completed, the essence of the object appears automatically.
What is important in phenomenology is to let the object completely penetrate the mind of the researcher. This is exactly what Barthes does: “I was overcome by an ‘ontological’ desire. I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself’, by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.”2
However, the phenomenology Barthes is going to employ is not one of subtle distinctions, as it was with Husserl. It is a, “vague, casual, even cynical phenomenology”3, in which the guiding lights are the Freudian instincts of Eros and Thanatos, love and death. It is clear what these are for Barthes: the love for his mother and his grief over her death, which destroyed in him the reason for continuing to live.
Semiology wouldn't be able to help him in this enterprise, because Photography has something indefinable for him; something one can only allude to, but not name. “Deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don't take, which turn, as milk does.” 4
Studium and punctum
It would be wrong, however, to state that Barthes has left semiology completely behind, as some commentators suggest. He made a distinction between studium and punctum. Studium literally means: “love, keen interest, participation and scientific practice”, while
Barthes described studium as a “general search without any special intensity.” The studium lies at the level of the arguable; of understanding. Although he never states it explicitly, it is clear that the studium is the domain of semiology. Barthes clearly alludes to it: “The studium is, ultimately, always coded, the punctum is not” 5
Approaching photography on the level of the studium is analyzing it as a system of signs. With the distinction between studium and punctum, semiology retains a position in Barthes' thinking. However, far more important in Camera Lucida is the punctum.
Punctum means: “the stab, the point.” The punctum of a photograph is that which touches us and causes pain. “A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”. 6
The punctum is often a detail that hasn't been put there consciously, as such, by the photographer. It is something that prompts a, “small shock, a satori, a passing of an emptiness” according to Barthes. Satori is an experience of enlightenment in Japanese Zen-Buddhism; the punctum resembles this greatly, which is not surprising in the light of Barthes’ Oedipal mysticism. The mystical aspect is also revealed by Barthes' refusal to define the punctum. “That which I can name cannot really stab me”, he writes, a phrase which seems to have been taken over directly from the Tao Te Ching: “That which I can name is not the eternal Tao,” Lao Tzu, the Chinese mystic wrote. 7 Barthes keeps the punctum outside the realm of the rational and discursive. It can only come to you in a flash which, according to him, brings photography close to the haiku. What binds them is “alert immobility”.
Beyond the image
But where does the punctum bring us? And what is the essence of photographic satori? With an example, Barthes tries to get his hold of Ariadne's thread. He looks at a portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in which he is struck by the expression of Bob Wilson, a minimal artist. He wants to meet him. Is this wish nothing but an expression of sympathy he felt towards Bob Wilson? Or is it a longing to step outside of his physical limits and, by way of the photograph, as it were, in a magical way be present with this person?
Further explanation suggests that the latter is probably close to the truth. Barthes compares the photograph to a film; whoever walks off the screen is still alive. We imagine him in a field that we cannot see; a “blind field”. The photograph doesn't know such a blind field, but when there is a punctum, a blind field is created. The punctum provides the photograph with a space, as it were, in which the imagination can take its course. According to Barthes, this is what distinguishes the erotic photograph from pornography. “The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond.”9 In this way, the punctum acquires the dimensions of a kind of aura radiated by the object in the photograph, penetrating time and space. This ties in with the second aspect of the punctum, which Barthes discovers further on in the book: that of time. When he sees the photograph made by Alexander Gardner in 1865 of the young Lewis Payne, who was sentenced to death, Barthes exclaims: “But the punctum is: he is going to die!” 10 When he sees his mother on the photograph, he is aware of the fact that she is going to die, and that, of course, is exactly what separates him from her: her death. This, in turn, is the fateful consequence of time.
In this connection, it is striking that the Latin dictionary mentions, “punctum temporalis: moment”. That is what strikes Barthes most about photography. It is the witness of the absolute moment. The punctum appears as a painful stab, a satori which binds the viewer to the eidos of the photograph, directly and without fuss. The punctum brought Barthes to the essence of photography, to which the studium never could bring him.
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Eidos and theatre
But, having come this far, what is the eidos (essence) of photography? This brings us to two closely-connected aspects which have been mentioned, but not explicitly discussed: death and time.
Barthes finds that photography doesn't resemble art, but rather theatre, because both theatre and photography have death in common. In the photograph, too, just like in Japanese No theatre, the immobile face that we know from the dead appears. Also, when he sees a photograph of himself, death appears before him. “Ultimately, what I am seeking in the Photograph taken of me (the ‘intention’ according to which I look at it), is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph.” 11
The fate of photography is that it captures all that is doomed to die, to disappear, and to be absorbed in the eternal motion of time. And it is time, therefore, that separates us from the objects in the photographs. With the photographs of his mother, Barthes writes: “With regard to many of these photographs, it was History which separated me from them. Is History not simply that time when we were not born?” 11
Time and death are connected to each other because everything that appears in time - everything that is perishable - will die or disappear one day. And the photograph preserves this; it is the remaining witness of that which has been.
The eidos of the photograph is: “that-has-been.” Barthes explains: “The name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: ‘That has been’.” 12 For Barthes, it was indisputable that photographs represented a reality. The crucial aspect of photography is that it really happened. This is as opposed to literature, film, and the visual arts, all of which belong to the realm of fiction. The photograph shows the Real in a past state; thus, the Real and the Past. It is an emanation of past Reality: magic and not art. Barthes wanted to have nothing to do with the “trend of semiologists” to deny realism in the photograph.
Why didn't Barthes want to recognize - in any way - the fictitious in photography? The answer is clear when we keep his mystical quest in mind. He could not recognize fiction because he would thereby deny the reality of his mystical object: his mother. The photograph is not only a witness of his mother's existence, but an authentication. “The Photograph's essence is to ratify what it represents.” 13 Barthes also reacts to Sartre, to whose book, L'imaginaire, he dedicates his own book. For Sartre, the representation of an object was its, “neant”, its, “not-being, denial”. 14 Following the theory of Sartre, Barthes writes: “Now, in Photography what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it.” 15
With regard to photography, Barthes is a positivist and a realist. Nothing can cause him to doubt the 'ça-a-été' (that-has-been) in any way. Maybe it is this certainty which drives him mad at the end of the book, for the photograph is at once that which has been and that which is no longer; in other words, a hallucination. He clarifies this hallucination through a comparison to the doll in the movie Casanova by Fellini. The automatic doll is unnatural, yet individual; unreal, yet present.
Return of the subject
The absolute realism of the 'ça-a-été' naturally demands the necessary objections. Barthes compared photography to history, the latter being an intellectual construction and the former a certain witness. Critic Steve Baker reacted to this by saying that photographs do show configurations of people and things, but never facts.16 A photograph of slavery is no proof that slavery ever existed, because slavery is an historical concept that can't become visual. Thus, the 'ça-a-été' of a photograph is limited if we rule out our historical knowledge. We must also realize that a photograph always carries with it the vision of the photographer. The image produced by photographic journalism, Michel Pincaut wrote, is nothing but an abstraction. “The objective reproduces only the surface of things; is that reality?” 17 According to both critics, that which a photograph shows - its essence - is far more relative than Barthes imagined.
The crucial matter is not what has been, but that it was seen and photographed in such-and-such a way: “that-has-been-seen”. The same applies to constructed photography. Whoever meditates on a constructed still-life for a long time will also probably come to an insight differing from Barthes'. As time plays a far less poignant role and construction itself, on the other hand, has a far more important one, the eidos should be different here. The decisive factor is not the fact that the objects in the photograph have existed, but the fact that this image has been constructed: “that-has-been-constructed”.
Philosopher François Soulages calls the doctrine of the ‘ça-a-ete' mythological. He suggests replacing it with 'ça-a-été-joué’ (that-which-has-been-played), which he feels explains the nature of photography better. 18 'Ça-a-été' sounds too absolute. It presupposes a permanent, undeniable, and realistic essence of photography; a real and genuine truth behind its appearance.
Jean Delord seeks an explanation of Barthes' essentialism in his semiological background. Also, in the seminal text of Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, the real and the true character of the photograph stands in the foreground, summed up in the term “denotation”.19
Delord writes that, behind the obviousness of the 'ça-a-été', stands the intelligence of semiology and its knowledge: a photograph can only confirm. As a sign, it is a direct reference to reality. 20
Common to all criticism of the 'ça-a-été' doctrine is that the representation of photography is always fragmentary. What 'été' (has-been) is, is not simply reality, but a moment; a summary, construction, and reduction of reality. A necessary reduction, but nonetheless 'empty', unreal, or nonexistent – and, in fact, a Neant (Nil). However - and this often makes interpreting Camera Lucida so confusing - this isn't entirely denied by Barthes. In the beginning of the book, he mentions the Buddhist expression for reality: shunyata, emptiness. This term carries with it a philosophy which emphasizes the constructed, perspective character or reality. And what better connection can there be to photography? However, the reference is in passing and, immediately afterwards, Barthes mentions another Buddhist term: ‘Tathata’, which is used to refer to the ultimately inexpressible. That, to him, applies to photography as well. “A photograph is always found at the end of a gesture; it says: that, it is that, that is so!”21 The photograph is thus an allusion; a hint given by the photographer. If we take this into account, the 'ça-a-été' sounds not so much realistic, but rather transparent, referential, and relative. With this, we arrive exactly at Barthes' final summary of the eidos of photography right at the end of the book: “Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits; mad if this realism is absolute (…).” 22
Psycho-analytical method
But, in spite of these mitigating comments, the problem remains that the eidos of photography keeps it outside the realm of art, as Barthes intended, but also provides photography, as a means of communication, with a seemingly objective character. The latter can never have been Barthes' intention, seeing as he was well aware of how connotations play a role in meaning. This explains the often-heard criticism that Barthes, with his purely subjective approach to photography, has fallen into an untenable position. This is most sharply formulated by Dana B. Polan. She calls his method a post-romantic egotism that reaches a peak in Camera lucida 23.
This, however, is a rather charged statement and doesn't do the book proper justice. After all, Barthes was the first to pose the question of the essence of photography; he would likely have never found an answer had he not sought refuge in a personal approach, in which his tenderness, pleasure, love, and fear were allowed to speak. It is true, as Paul Beceyro remarks, that the photograph of his mother is an extreme case. 24 However, without his mother as the real subject of his search, Barthes would probably not have written Camera Lucida. Besides critical reactions, the book has inspired many people in the field of photography criticism. The most important of these are the followers of the 'mathesis singularis' (literally: singular method), as Barthes called it, and the pioneers of the psycho-analytical approach.
Barthes suggested, arriving at a specific aesthetics of photography, a “mathesis singularis”. One of the first to work on this was Pierre Dreyfuss. He has designed an aesthetic which makes use of only photographic terms.25 Henri Vanlier, too, on the one hand, was inspired by the naïvetés of Barthes' phenomenology; on the other hand, continuing along the lines of semiology, he made a start at an “esthetica practica”. 26
Victor Burgin found inspiration in Camera Lucida to approach photography through psycho-analysis. The punctum, he says, can be explained very well in psychological terms when we relate it to the unconscious. 27 Joan Fontcuberta has also taken the psycho-analytic approach, of which his article Eros and Thanatos is a good example. 28
Finally, post-modernist American critics tie punctum to the term deconstruction. To them, the punctum is the non-discursive; the break with classical rationalism and the definition of what can be non-logically analyzed in post-modern photography.
Camera Lucida is often such a dark and unfathomable book that it is a rich source of information and inspiration. It is a return of the subject and consciousness to photography criticism, which were shunned by semiology. That is why Camera Lucida is important. Phenomenology certainly doesn't have to be a denial of the successes of semiology; both methods are just as valuable to both social photography and art photography. That is why you may hope that photography criticism will find a synthesis of both methods, of which Barthes was a pioneer.
Notes
1. Roland Barthes (1981), Camera Lucida, New York, Hill & Wang, p. 69 or (1993), Vintage Book, London
2. Barthes, p. 3
3. Barthes, p. 20
4. Barthes, p. 6
5. Barthes, p. 51
6. Barthes, p. 27
7. Lao-Tzu, (-300 BC), Tao Te Ching, various editions; first chapter
8. Barthes, p. 59.
9. Barthes, p. 59.
10. Barthes, p. 96
11. Barthes, p. 64.
12. Barthes, p. 77.
13. Barthes, p. 85.
14. Jean Paul Sartre, (1980), L' lmaginaire, Gallimard,p. 28.
15. Barthes, p. 115.
16. Steve Baker, (1983), Against Camera Lucida, in: Creative Camera, no: 219, p.864.
17. Michel Pincaut, (1983), in: Pour la Photographie, Germs,Sammeron, p. 177.
18. François Soulages, (1983), in: Pour la Photographie,Germs, Sammeron, p. 268.
19. Denotation: see our article: Artdoc, The semiology of photography
20. Jean Delord, (1981), Roland Barthes et la Photographie, Paris, Créatis, p. 91.
21. Barthes, p. 16.
22. Barthes, p. 119.
23. Dana P. Polan, (1981), Roland Barthes and the moving image, in: October 18. See also https://www.jstor.org/stable/778409?seq=1
24. Paul Beceyro, (1983), in: Pour la Photographie; Germs,Sammeron, p. 119.
25. Pierre Dreyfuss, (1983), in: Pour la Photographie, pp7ff and pp 186 ff.
26. Henri Vanlier, (1984), Philosophie de la Photographie; Les Cahiers de la Photographie, Paris.
27. Victor Burgin, (1982), Barthes' Semiology and 'LaChambre Claire', in: Camera Austria, 10/82.
28. Joan Fontcuberta, (1984), Eros and Thanatos, in: Photovision.
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