Lingua Obscura

Camera Obscura Lucida* by Roland Barthes. Have you read it?  Can you read it? I’ve been reading extracts and I have some serious issues with it.

I know a lot of big words but obviously not as many as Roland Barthes. I found it hard to actually understand what he was saying from the outset because of the dense and impenetrable dialectic and it got steadily worse as I waded through. It made me quite angry. Is that heresy? Accessible it isn’t. To me, it reads like self-congratulatory academic willy-waving. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

He should tick all the right boxes for me so I’m very disappointed too.

So, if I have read it correctly (and it is a big IF)… you have the photographer (operator), the photographed (target, referant, ‘little simulacrum’) and the viewer (spectator). There are photos that have interest (studium) and those that grab you (punctum). A photo of his mother aged 5 grabbed his attention and he rediscovered her. There, you don’t need to read it

And in the extracts I read there wasn’t even an illustration of the Winter Garden photo of his mother. Very provocative, not.

There is an excellent and interesting photography site called Unphotographable that has no photos, just descriptions of what wasn’t photographed. I can deal with that though, there is a good upfront reason for it.

Barthes freely admits to having no experience of being the operator but plenty of being the spectator and target. And he has a great deal to say about those two ‘emotions/intentions‘ (in Barthespeak)  and uses very long and/or difficult words to do so. It is a real shame that he is not a photographer because behind it all I got the impression he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

Maybe it got lost in translation somewhere.

I’ve read a great deal that has been written by the operators themselves (ie photographers in realspeak) about how they work. They are often amused/surprised/puzzled at the constructions and interpretations that are applied to their photos by academics. They usually write with directness too, much more accessible than Barthes.

Rant over

* I originally wrote obscura instead of lucida. Nuff said.

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