Grace (and interconnectedness, again).

Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida is, as mentioned in class, a seminal text in media and art studies in general. I started reading the book with this in mind, thinking I would have to power through a dense text of theoretical speculation. I was proved wrong. The subtlety and delicacy in Barthes’s writing greatly surprised me. Throughout the book, the theme of photography’s silence I found especially congruent with my conception of the trade, and what we’ve talked about in class, not to mention with the style and wording of the book. Barthes introduces many concepts that go along with this theme of silence and grace. There’s the obvious, initially: the studium and punctum. Camera Lucida is barely three decades old. Because of this, the ideas like studium and punctum are still applicable to photography, in spite of it’s dynamic nature. Studium and punctum are two notions that are necessarily applicable to all photographs. Humans’ sociological conditioning makes for studium to be very much universal and widespread. This would account for some amateur photographs getting so much attention from all corners of the world. The punctum however, is much more subjective and personal, although personally I consider that there might be certain punctum that are societal, or at least plural within a group of people. On a more personal note, I found Barthes’s classification of the “adventure” of photography genius.

Other concepts introduced by Barthes that illustrate the delicacy of photography are the silence he says it inherently should have, and the pensiveness he proposes. I found Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Phil Glass and Bob Wilson exceptionally illustrative of this. That photograph has a specific kairos, a perfect moment, a certain je ne sais quoi, as cliché as it might sound. As Barthes puts it, we cannot know what it is that gives the photograph it’s punctum. Is it the silence emanating from the subjects? The tension in Wilson’s hands and breath? What is it that makes you hold your breath once you see that photograph? Personally, that photograph did for me what the necklace did for Barthes in Van der Zee’s: it made my mind connect to other situations, other images, other memories. I think this is the central point Barthes is discussing: how photography’s simplicity, a well-perceived kairos, gives external life to a photograph, a transcending, an interconnectedness (to fall back on what I’ve previously written).