Death and Madness in Photography

I found Barthes’ discussion towards the end of Camera Lucida on the photograph’s curious relationship to both memory and Death to be very interesting. For Barthes, the essence of the photograph is that it provides irrefutable evidence of the “that-has-happened,” forever freezing a moment of the present and locking it into history. However, despite the fact that the photograph is indeed physical proof of the past, it is also, troublingly to Barthes, “without future (this is its pathos, its melancholy); in it, no protensity” (90). It is this finitude of the image that renders photography so flat and impenetrable – and that leads to Barthes to define photography as “violent.”

This linkage of photography and Death takes on extra significance in Barthes analysis of Gardner’s Portrait of Lewis Payne. As Barthes writes, “by giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future” (96). In this photograph, the viewer is directly confronted with the medium’s problematic relationship with time and history. At first, the viewer is disturbed at the prospect of the man’s imminent death in conjunction with his forlorn gaze. Only then is it realized that the subject in the photograph is already dead, and indeed has been for a century – leaving the viewer reeling from what Barthes refers to as, “this vertigo of Time defeated” (97). It is this feeling when one looks at an old photograph, “They have their whole lives before them,” (96) that lends photography its eerie, disturbing air. These photographs at once seem to defy Death and yet are unmistakably marred by it. Although they depict a moment in which time is frozen, the past they show was always fatally marred by Death from the moment the photo was taken – as Barthes writes, “there is always the defeat of Time in them” (96).

The part of Barthes’ analysis I found most interesting is how he then relates this unavoidability of Death in photographs to his concept of punctum, and then links photography to madness. As far as I understood, ultimately for Barthes the punctum is that detail that allows him access to the unreal, Time-defeated, Death-marred universe of the photograph; to “[enter] crazily into the spectacle, into the image” (117). While all photographs provide evidential proof of a moment of the past, a moment that is now marked by Death, only when there is a punctum can this truly be understood, appreciated, and most importantly, felt. As Barthes writes, “I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented… taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die” (117). For Barthes, although this embracing of the dead and frozen constitutes madness, it is this very property of photography that constitutes its essence, and makes it so disturbing, melancholic, and moving.