Post 3: Light, Umbilical Cords, Indexicality, Etc.

I found Barthes' exploration/explication of the photograph as a physical-chemical object in chapter 34 to be particularly enticing. He attributes Photography's origin to "the day when a scientific circumstance... made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent" (80).

Like Bazin, Barthes ascribes a physical connection between the reality represented within the photograph and the photograph itself. However, he poses it in an importantly disparate structure. He posits the notion of photograph as "an emanation of the referent," describing that "a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed" (80-1).

This notion poses numerous interesting points and problematic associations. Although Bazin and similar thinkers also attribute the indexicality of the photograph to the light that reflects off the photograph-subject and then instigates the chemical process that leads to an image of that photograph-subject, Barthes forgoes this in postulating the real connection as a sort of umbilical cord between the gazer and the gazed and a process by which the radiations that touched the photographic subject ultimately touch Barthes/the spectator. The direction of light in generating the indexicality of the photograph, whilst contributing to its essential and affective qualities as medium, has changed from Bazin to Barthes. It's trajectory is significantly altered.

His choice of umbilical cord as form of linkage is unmistakably a textual byproduct of Barthes' cerebral and internal connection between the essence of the Photograph and his relationship to his mother. This image is even further personalized and newly eroticized in the phrase "carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed" (81). The light caresses, it provides pleasure. It is of and to the body. The gazer and the gazed share a skin.

Is the subject-object relation between viewer and viewed deconstructed through the two-way trajectory of light between Spectator and Operator? No. The light only touches the surface, the skin. It is but a contingency on either party. It forms a context around them. The light emanated by the referent brings the viewer into the viewed's network of contexts. Barthes' hypothetical relationship between viewer and viewed is clear in terms of direction and material, but of its depth, Barthes is seemingly unclear.