A Great Article About Barthes and 'Camera Lucida'

By far the coolest thing about blogging, at least in my personal experience, is that you learn something as the result of almost every post. For example, when I wrote about appliances this week—appliances, of all things—we heard from Rob, the owner of "a large elderly apartment project" who has purchased hundreds of appliances, and Peter Jeffrey Croft, who is an electronics tech. Almost no matter what I write about, we hear from somebody who knows a lot more about it than I do, and we get to access that person's expert knowledge or practical experience. It almost never fails.

People do complain that we get on "jags" a lot, where one post on something leads to more. But that's kinda the way it goes when a discussion topic gets going, that's all. I don't sit down to write multiple posts about anything. It just works out that way.

Anyway, after I wrote "Punctum Def" the other day, an attempt to define Barthes' idea of the punctum, or telling detail, I heard from Ken Dixon, who sent me a link to his essay "Lucida and Me."

"Lucida and Me" might honestly be the best thing I've ever read about Camera Lucida. Ken both takes Barthes to task for his faults and flaws holding nothing back—he is scathing on the topic of punctum and the very word itself—but he is also lavish in his praise for the book's accomplishments, which he communicates with clear-eyed precision. "Punctum" he calls "a needlessly obscure way of saying that certain photographs have a certain something about them that makes them special to certain someones—a commonplace that when draped in Latin becomes a shiny original thing, a breathtakingly sophisticated utterance." Made me laugh. At any rate, managing cutting criticism and fulsome praise in the same short essay is the mark of an experienced writer with a confident compass.

I've always suspected that a telltale of real admiration is when you wish you'd done something yourself—you see a photograph and think "man, I wish I'd taken that." It can happen in just about any field. A chef might wish he had developed a certain recipe after tasting a dish at a restaurant; a songwriter might hear a wonderful song and wish she had written it. It's a bit narcissistic—something is so good that you'd be willing to fold it into the precious self? How kind! Still, I occasionally read an essay or an article and I'll think, man, I wish I had written that. It's jealously to some extent, but also an expression of wholehearted admiration too.

'Too True'
Ken told me that the essay is included in his book Too True, but when I searched "Too True Kenneth Dixon" on Amazon I got crickets. You have to search for K.B., not Kenneth. I have not read Too True yet—I'm in the middle of Autobiography of a Supertramp at the moment—but it's in the queue. I hope I'll have the discipline to write a review of it here once I've read it.

"Lucida and Me" is a tasty intro, tho'. I'll ask you what you thought of it a week from now. Please remind me if I forget.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

calvin amari: "I note that this critique begins with a contrast: the author 'read the Sontag book [On Photography] many years ago with pleasure.'

"I find that odd, because I think Sontag’s overall view of photography is more skeptical than Barthes’. But might it be that, despite Sontag’s skepticism of photography, Ken Dixon was taken with a good number of the book’s trenchant observations about the medium? Perhaps, for example, Sontag's observation about photographs of politicians that: 'For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common than [a frontal view]: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.' If so, I agree, but that line—and at least a half dozen others that I have flagged in an old paperback copy that is not only heavily dog-eared and underlined but also bears some bruises from being helicoptered across the room at least once—is lifted without citation from something Barthes penned 20 years before: 'A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common than [a frontal view], suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.'"

Mike replies: Goes to the intensity with which artists/writers/thinkers want to be their idols, perhaps? I believe I read once that Samuel Beckett so admired James Joyce that he not only wore the same type of shoes as Joyce, but in Joyce's size, even though they were too small for his own feet! And another author, I forget whom, who fair-copied their idol in longhand as a way of grabbing on to the elusive magic of the cadence and tone of the admired prose.

Michael Hill: "It's not often I come across someone reading The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp...W.H. Davies is my great uncle so I just had to comment.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Cool!

It deserves to be considered a cult book, since the band Supertramp took their name from it and a famous tragic hero took it as his name (Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, of the book [and movie] Into the Wild. The book is an engrossing read. I haven't seen the movie). Not to the level of The Catcher in the Rye perhaps, but in the same precincts. As you probably know, your great-uncle was skeptical of his own title, but his champion George Bernard Shaw convinced him to keep it!

David Comdico: "Barthes is a great and subtle writer and Camera Lucida is a wonderful exploration of his own phenomenological response to photographs, but it is a categorical error to apply his ideas to photography itself. He more or less admits this, as he does in the epilogue to Mythologies where he concedes a necessary degree of subjectivity which in Camera Lucida is taken to an extreme.

"In short, the punctum is not a photographic property. It is an artifact of (Barthes’) perception and experience. He cleverly does not include the photo which has the most meaning to him, that of his mother, because, he says, it would have little to no meaning to the average reader. There is a fair amount of subterfuge here, related to Barthes’ larger project of de-centering the author and replacing him or her with the critic.

"What’s interesting, and ironic, is how pervasive this worldview has become and how the deconstructionist take is assumed as a given, as 'a thing that goes without saying.' Many photographers now simply think of themselves as critics with a camera, which allows them to be both sophisticated and indolent."

Mike replies: Yes. As I used to say, photography is not about photography.

Comments

[John Camp]

I enjoyed Ken's well-written and thoughtful essay, even though I disagree with large parts of it -- especially the part you quoted. "Punctum...a needlessly obscure way of saying that certain photographs have a certain something about them that makes them special to certain someones—a commonplace that when draped in Latin becomes a shiny original thing, a breathtakingly sophisticated utterance."

If you wish to discuss Punctum, once you understand the concept, what should you do? Should you say, "Punctum" each time you need to, or should you say, "a certain something about them that makes them special to certain someones?" Frankly, I would find repeating a 12-word phrase each time I wanted to refer to a concept to be tiresome. Barthes could have chosen some other word, of course, but he didn't -- and it was his book.

I found the concept of Punctum much more interesting than the second part of the book, which I thought was the commonplace part. Most people consciously experience what Barthes is talking about in Part II -- in fact, it's really the whole reason people take personal photos. Like Ken, I have a couple of personal photos like that, hanging from the wall a few feet from my writing desk.If I were to see Ken's photo of his wife, or if Ken were to see my photo of my daughter with a pumpkin, I think we might both recognize the quality of engagement in the photos.

But that is not Punctum. Punctum is something entirely different; I think there are a great many famous photographs that do not have Punctum, for either their creators or their viewers. Punctum has a shock to it. It's not something you anticipate or share with others. It doesn't give you a warm feeling (though I suppose it could.) It's a quality outside the expected, and it doesn't necessarily have any fixed meaning, even for the person it shocks. It is a quality that goes directly to an individual psychology, which is what makes it hard to discuss; it's there for you, but not for me, and vice versa. I do think most serious photographers experience it from time to time, though it maybe be a rare thing.

[John Krumm]

I just bought Ken's book for my Kobo e-reader, and it's great. Perfect way to sit out the snowstorm we are experiencing in Duluth right now. Nice find.

[Tex Andrews]

Thanks, Mike. I will read the essay. I too had trouble with the Barthes, even as I admire him, just as I did with Sontag's "On Photography". I think my main issue is that they both seem to be writing to hear themselves talk. They're clever more than profound in these essays. I was once called clever by a professor I really admired; it wasn't a compliment. Cut me to the quick, and it wasn't entirely true, but partly so, and that was bad enough.

[Robert Roaldi]

A few weeks ago, I came across a cover of "Plastic Jesus" online by Justine Lucas and Jordan Finlay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVcDZLNW-gA), first time I'd heard the song in decades. That's exactly what I thought when I heard it, 'I wish I'd written that.'

[darlene]

Thank you, John Camp.

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

Thanks for sharing that.

Makes me wonder if Ken ever wrote a similar critique about Sontag, given how he started his essay. That would also be an interesting read.

I tried a quick search, but no useful results.

[David Aiken]

I haven't read Barthes but I own a copy of Sontag's book and I've tried to read it a couple of times. I keep giving up. What she's talking about strikes me as interesting to critics of photography but as a person who takes photographs she's talking about things which don't interest me.

I've got a couple of books by photographers about how they approach photography and the things in photographs which interest them. I've got a copy of Stephen Shore's "The Nature of Photographs" and what he says about photographs interests me. What Sontag says in her book doesn't interest me.

From what you and Ken have said I don't feel an urge to read Barthes and it isn't because I can't handle dense discussions, I've got a degree in philosophy and I've worked my way through modern philosophers like Wittgenstien and even a bit of Sartre because I had to but I was a lot younger then and doing it for a purpose. I'm older now and I don't want or need to dip into theorising that doesn't grab me.

On the other hand I'm quite happy to read what people like you, Ken, and John Camp want to say about Barthes and Sontag and I'm open to being convinced about having a go at Barthes. I'm just not about to volunteer to do that until someone says something that gives me a reason to do so.

Keep up the discussion, I'm very happy to watch from the sidelines.

[Joe Kashi]

Mr. Dixon’s essay strikes true, particularly his wonderfully-phrased first half, as do many of the comments.

Much of Sontag and Barthes remind me of a comment by one of my first-year law school professors that wordiness and obscurity evidence a lack of clear understanding of your case.

One other thought: much of the discussion, and perhaps a source of the obscurity, revolves around over-generalization of the authors’ own subjective reactions to older photos of personal import.

[Moose]

An interesting, generally enjoyable and/or bracing essay. Some good writing I may crib from. \;~)>

Although:
"There is no question that it is a melancholic medium—to experience it as a tragic one requires a certain exertion and a certain predisposition."

Here, he seems to me to have fallen partway down Barthes' rabbit hole. I do not find it that way. I would perhaps say:

"to experience photography as a tragic medium requires a certain exertion and a certain predisposition."

I am not given to melancholy, nostalgia and so on. He makes, in a way, the same mistake as Barthes, and endless others, generalizing his own feelings to be those of all others.

[Moose]

This talk about Barthes and Sontag makes me think about books by people who make photographs and other visual art, rather than people who make words about the art others make.

Jay Maisel talks about the photos he has made in way I find interesting and helpful (and just plain enjoyable).

The Practice of Contemplative Photography, by Andy Karr and Michael Wood
and
Why Photographs Work, by George Barr
have been very helpful to me.

August Kleon's Steal Like an Artist makes sense of looking at LOTS of photos, not to duplicate, but to find what moves you and work to create something from that.

Like Kleon, David Bayles & Ted Orland are not photographers, but in Art and Fear, address problems germane to photographers.

I have a weird relationship with God Is at Eye Level, by Jan Phillips. I just couldn't get into it. Then, I read another book full of quotes from it, which were wonderful. I went back . . .

My problem turns out to be that I am not much engaged with her illustrative photos. I do visual first. In my own photo books, there is only one line of text, thanks to a friend and host. (So glad I did that, before her untimely death.)

Her own writing and the large collections of quotes from others are excellent. I just need to imagine other illustrations. \;~)> You may not need that.

And just because . . .
Mother Earth, edited by Judith Boice, is such a beautiful plethora of photographs, apposite quotes and beautiful writing, that it just might fire or refire your passion to capture from the world stuff that feeds your soul . . . and perhaps those of others.

[Great comment, but one small correction, Ted Orland is indeed a photographer. --Mike]

[Moose]

". . . but one small correction, Ted Orland is indeed a photographer."

I knew that, I think so, anyway. Why didn't I when I wrote? Good thing I'm not a blogger. \;~)>

`)>