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Roland Barthes On Photography: Code Message
Roland Barthes On Photography: Code Message
MESSAGE CODE
denotation connotation
photograph caption
obvious or informational symbolic
traumatic ideological
records transforms
studium punctum
signifiance
Barthes: Camera Lucida
Public / Private responses to the photograph
Barthes and the “return” to phenomenology
To define the eidos of photography
eidos = appearance, idea, constitutive nature, species
What common basis unites all our otherwise different
“encounters” with photography?
The noeme or “essence” of photography
What I “intentionalize” in photography is “that-has-
been.”
The “intentionality of imagination,” or a purely personal
relation to the photograph
Barthes:
the eidos of photography
The essential nature of our subjective
experience of photography is defined by an
irreducible singularity.
To experience time as a singular and
unrepeatable event.
“Every photograph is a certification of presence”
“I want a history of looking” (12), or the
irreducibility of the emotional experience of
looking at photographs.
the Spectrum: the experience of being-
photographed
the Spectator: the desire and emotion aroused by the
act of looking at specific photographs
To experience time as a singular and
non-repeatable event.
“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”
“. . . The Photograph . . . represents the very
subtle moment when . . . I am neither subject
nor object but a subject who feels he is
becoming an an object: I then experience a
micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am
truly becoming a specter” (14).
The studium and the punctum
The studium refers to the range of
photographic meanings available and obvious
to everyone.