Camera Lucida (book)

Camera Lucida (La chambre claire, Paris 1980) is an essay by the French philosopher Roland Barthes. His latest release is one of the standard works on the photograph. Wavering between the systematic findings and very intimate, concerned, among other things his mother's death parts, Barthes gave his essay subtitled " Notes on Photography " ( Note sur la photographie ).

Composition of the essay

The book is divided into two parts. The first part reviews the recent literature, see, boundaries and generally binding statements about the photograph. Barthes here gives the opportunity to try to develop a phenomenology and a compendium of photography. The second part, however, is very intimate, which he in turn unmasks doctrinal statements about the photograph from the first part (see deconstruction ). In this part, which appears for his media-theoretical discourse on the most important photograph, the photograph is not printed as a single photo in the strip. It is his mother, that he discovers in the search for the essence of his mother for him by chance while browsing the photos after her death a childhood photograph. Thus Barthes, the subjectivity in his discourse on the photograph out: " There exists solely for me ( ... ) it would be best for your studies of interest: Era, clothing, Photogenität; but it would not in the least hurt you. "

Central concepts of the essay

To the concept of studying heard his concept of the punctum. So are addressed Barthes frequently cited and happy faced as a dichotomy terms from this work. He developed in the first part, the second part, however, he plays in the well-known notation for him (which, Barthes ' écriture ') so he swapped them superimposed in order to not end his discourse in a " doxa ", a doctrine leave.

These two terms can be contrapuntal two different modes of action of the photograph describe. The studium of a photograph corresponds to the general interest of the viewer to a photograph whose meaning he can study because of its historically and culturally shaped possibilities of knowledge. Barthes writes:

However, Barthes employs here is less the overall message of an image, but an essential sensory effect on the viewer which hardly or not speakable, atopic. To this end, he developed the concept of the punctum:

Comparisons with Walter Benjamin

In many cases, be drawn between this essai of Barthes and the essays on photography by Walter Benjamin parallels and comparisons with regard to their respective perception. Jacques Derrida said that " both the resources of the phänomeneologischen and also penetrate the structural analysis, exceed and exploit ". Her essays "might be the two basic texts for the so-called question of the SPEAKERS in the technical modernity very well. "

Punctum and Aura

The concept of the punctum in Barthes overlaps with the concept of Aura in Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and in Benjamin's Little History of Photography. As the punctum generates the aura for Benjamin a " chok ", which sets the " association " mechanism ineffective. Barthes: " So I went through my mother's photos, following a trail that led to this cry that ends each language :" It is, " ... a rude awakening, by any " likeness " is triggered, the satori, where! words fail, the rare, perhaps unique evidence of "So, so, so, and nothing more ." "

View, Aura, expression

Another parallel is found in the importance of the gaze and the tension between generalizable and subjective moments of Aura in Benjamin and the expression in the " photographic (s ) View " in Barthes. Benjamin: " The Respected or Viewed believer suggests the view. Experience the aura of a phenomenon is, they borrow against the assets to turn over his eyes, " Barthes refers to as Benjamin on the perceptions and experiences in which we believe looked at and transmits this to the paradox in the photographic view ". The photographic view has something paradoxical, which one sometimes encounters in real life: I recently saw in the cafe a young man who cast his eyes around the room; now and then his eyes fell on me; at such a moment I had the certainty that he was looking at me, without, however, be sure that he saw me, inconceivable inversion: how can you watch without looking? Apparently separates the PHOTOGRAPHIE the attention of perception and sets only the former into the picture, although it is not conceivable without the latter; but funny phenomenon: a noema noesis without an act of thinking without thought, a destinations without a goal. . Yet this brings incomprehensible process, the extremely rare phenomenon of an expression out " Based on a photograph by André Kertész ( " Piet Mondrian in his studio ', Paris 1926) provides Barthes then the question: "How can you have an intelligent expression, without some Intelligent thinking? "because the portrayed at the moment of the photograph only a piece of black plastic look. "It is as if the view that controls the economy of vision, would be retained by something internal ," says Barthes, by entering into another photo André Kertész, which shows a boy with a dog. While looking the boy " with sad, jealous, fearful eyes " into the camera, but in " reality he sees nothing; he keeps his love and fear inside back: otherwise the VIEW ".