Camera Lucida

                                                                  PART II CAMERA OBSCURA

Introduction: Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida and the Sirens

The first photographs a man contemplated (Niepce in front of the dinner table, for instance) must have seemed to him to resemble exactly certain paintings (still the camera obscura); he knew, however, that he was nose-to-nose with a mutant (a Martian can resemble a man); his consciousness posited the object encountered outside of any analogy, like the ectoplasm of “what-had-been”: neither image nor reality, a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 

In 1833 William Henry Fox Talbot was sketching on the shores of Lake Como during his honeymoon. He was attempting to use a camera lucida to help him draw the village, lake and mountains. A camera lucida is an optical drawing device which consists of an adjustable metal arm fastened at one end to an artist’s sketchbook and a glass prism at the other; it creates a refracted image of the scene superimposed on the pages of the sketchbook. He imagined that it would be a simple process to trace the scene but he became frustrated with the results.  He remarked: “when the eye was removed from the prism-in which all looked beautiful-I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.”

He made small camera boxes, which became known as camera obscura which is a wooden box with a lens at one end that projects the scene before it onto a piece of frosted glass at the back, where the artist can trace the outlines on paper. Talbot created images of houses and trees but remained frustrated with his failure to fix the image on paper.  He “the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” He began a series of experiments to discover if it would be possible to fix the images on paper, rather than for them to just fade away. 

He began to experiment with finding a way to capture an image on paper so that it would remain fixed over time. He discovered that a sheet of writing paper, coated with salt and brushed with a solution of silver nitrate, darkened in the sun but that a second coating of salt delayed more darkening. He used this discovery to make tracings of leaves and plants. He put a leaf on a piece of sensitized paper, covered it with a sheet of glass, and placed it in the sun. Where the light struck the paper it darkened but where the plant blocked the light, it remained white. He called his discovery “the art of photogenic drawing.” 

After years of experimentation with different chemical compositions to stabilize his images, he created the first photography book, The Pencil of Nature, which he published in 1844. However, these early images remained ephemeral and faded even if exposed to low light. 

In the mid-1820s, even before Talbot’s experiments with a camera obscura, Daguerre was searching for a way to capture and fix images. In 1829, he partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem, and they invented the daguerreotype. This is a one-of-a-kind photographic image that is imprinted on a polished, silver-plated sheet of copper. The copper is exposed in a large box camera, sensitized with iodine vapors, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized with salt water. Daguerre photographed the moon, shells, fossils and spiders. He made views of Paris, portraits, and still life compositions. Fewer than twenty-five of his photographs have survived. Thus, from its very beginnings, photography had a dual character—as a medium of artistic expression and as a scientific tool.

Even though daguerreotypes are precise, fixed and stable, they are one-off images; they cannot be reproduced. One the other hand, Talbot’s paper photographs lacked precision, clarity and stability but they had one important advantage: from a single negative hundreds of virtually identical photographic prints could be produced. Because they were fixed on paper they could be pasted in albums, matted and framed like engravings or made into printed books. Their lack of clarity, resolution and dynamic range made them more artistic than the precise but inflexible daguerreotype.  Reproducibility prevailed over accuracy.  

“Camera obscura” is a Latin phrase that means darkened room. It refers to the optical phenomena that occurs when an image of a scene passes through a small hole in a box or a room and strikes a surface inside. The room must be dark to see the image. The scene is reproduced but it is inverted (upside down) and reversed (left to right). The color and perspective of the image are preserved. Leonardo da Vinci wrote the oldest known description of a camera obscura in 1502. In the collection Codex Atlanticus, da Vinci wrote:

If the facade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole.

The camera obscura’s reduction of a three-dimensional scene to a two dimensional image greatly influenced Western art. Vermeer, for example, used camera obscura techniques to create perspective in his paintings.

This new discovery was very exciting to painters, since it intensified the new illusion of perspective and of the third dimension that is so closely related to the printed word. But the early spectators of the moving image in the sixteenth century saw those images upside down. For this reason the lens was introduced in order to turn the picture right side up. Our normal vision is also upside down. Psychically, we learn to turn our visual world right side up by translating the retinal impression from visual into tactile and kinetic terms. Right side up is apparently something we feel but cannot see directly. 

Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, The Photograph, The Brothel Without Walls

On the other hand, a camera lucida is an optical device that is used as a drawing tool by artists to trace a subject.  The artist looks through a prism while he is drawing on paper. One eye is looking through the prism, the other is looking down at the paper. The artist sees the subject and the tracing on the drawing paper at the same time. This allows him to trace the subject on the paper in perspective. The camera lucida projects an image that may only be seen in the artist’s mind; it is a mysterious process. This double image can only be perceived in the mind of the artist. The image is absent but it is also present because it exists as a tracing on paper. It creates an illusion of a scene in the artist’s mind and that illusion is translated into a drawing. It is an inaccurate, distorted translation. Even in the hands of a highly skilled artist, no one would mistake the representation for the thing.

A camera lucida and obscura are very different instruments. A camera lucida is a drawing tool that is used in daylight to help an artist draw a scene.  It does not mechanically produce an accurate image. It is not related to the development of photography. A camera obscura, on the other hand, uses a lens to project an image on a dark surface such as a wall or the back of an enclosed box. Its  purpose is to reproduce an accurate image of a scene; it does not use human intervention to create the image. It is an important step in the development of the camera and photography. 

This raises the question of whether Barthes should have titled his book Camera Obscura. It is the predecessor to the modern camera and is used even today to make photographs. A camera lucida is not related to the art of photography; it is a drawing tool that was mis-named to suggest a camera. The book design of Camera Lucida suggests that a camera obscura could have been its central metaphor.  Barthes’ use of the ode and palinode in Part One and Part Two of Camera Lucida suggests an image that is upside down and reversed.

It is clear that Barthes considered this question but he concluded that associating photography with the camera obscura would be a mistake. In Camera Lucida he quotes Maurice Blanchot to support his position.  Blanchot was a prominent literary critic and a contemporary of Barthes who anticipated many of the innovations of structuralism and post-structuralism.  He influenced Barthes’ thinking in Writing Degree Zero and The Neutral; we see much evidence of Blanchot in Camera Lucida. On this question, Barthes quotes Blanchot:

It is a mistake to associate Photography, by reason of its technical origins, with the notion of a dark passage (camera obscura). It is camera lucida that we should say (such was the name of that apparatus, anterior to Photography, which permitted drawing an object through a prism, one eye on the model, the other on the paper); for,  from the eye’s viewpoint, ‘the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy, and yet more in-accessible and mysterious than the thought of the innermost being without signification, yet summoning up the depth of any possible meaning; unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens’.

Roland Barthes, (quoting Blanchot), Camera Lucida 

What does Blanchot’s reference to the image as both absence and presence and unrevealed and manifest, mean? What is the “lure and fascination” of the Sirens? What does this enigmatic quote tell us about the photography’s essence? 

Blanchot had much to say about photography and the image yet, surprisingly, there has been little critical discussion of his writing. In the Space of Literature Blanchot describes the meaning of the image:  It abandons its ‘sensory’ nature, abandons the world, draws back from the world, and draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, and yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space. By holding the print in our hands, time and space collapse into the here and the now; they co-exist in an uneasy, oscillating tension. 

The image of a person, place or thing  is visually present and yet, its mere presence signifies the absence of the person, place or thing.  This line of thinking is similar to that found in  Camera Lucida where Barthes wrote that  the photograph has been “absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred”. 

In his book Death Sentence, Blanchot’s narrator describes a photograph hanging in a doctor’s office:

On the wall of his office there was an excellent photograph of the Turin Sudario, a photograph in which he saw two images superimposed on one another: one of Christ and one of Veronica; and as a matter of fact I distinctly saw, behind the figure of Christ, the features of a woman’s face—extremely beautiful, even magnificent in its strangely proud expression. 

Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence 

This photograph illustrates the principle of absence and presence. We see the presence of Jesus and Veronica in the same photograph but they are absent at the same time. We see this same notion in Barthes description of a camera lucida. The artist’s visual perception of the world is split: with one eye he sees an image of the world, with the other he sees an image of his tracing of the world on a sheet of drawing paper. 

We look at an image of a scene of a distant place in a former time from the vantage point of our present, which is always and immediately flowing into the past. This point is profoundly obvious but it continues to fascinate.  Through this paradox,  Blanchot views the image as a metaphorical corpse which is neither dead nor alive and neither present nor absent:

It is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else. What is there, with the absolute calm of something that has found its place, does not, however, succeed in being convincingly here.

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

Building upon this observation, Blanchot writes in The Space of Literature that the image’s paradoxical cadaverous effect confronts the viewer with the limits of the knowable, something akin to the vicarious experience of the corpse’s own wandering state and the “absolute neutrality of death.

Perhaps inspired by Blanchot, Barthes articulates the notion that the photograph is a metaphorical corpse and that photographers are instruments of death. He writes in Camera Lucida:

 If the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing.

Roland Barthes,  Camera Lucida

Because the image of a living person on a print is fixed, frozen and inert, it reflects a state of stability that we achieve only in death. The subject is destabilized by the the very fixity of its own image.  Writing about a photograph of his own image, Blanchot observes in his Death Sentence that: Once I am dead, it will represent only the shell of an enigma, and I hope those who love me will have the courage to destroy it, without trying to learn what it means. Blanchot is suggesting that the quest of finding the essence of photography is doomed. He questions the ability of the image to tell us anything truthful at all:

Not only is the image of an object not the sense of this object, and not only is it of no avail in understanding the object, it tends to withdraw the object from understanding by maintaining it in the immobility of a resemblance which has nothing to resemble. 

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

This is similar to Goddard’s remark that an image is just an image; there is no just image. 

The image represents both a trace of the presence of the personal, living referent and its absence from the present life, which is its death. The image reveals both the death of the body and the transcendence of death.  Lyons explains:

Where the image may confront us with the neutrality of a death always yet to come, its greatest threat may simply be its capacity to withstand, to take the place of its subject, unmaking it. That is, the image reveals the death from which it itself is exempted. As an object, of course, the image may deteriorate, but it may always be reproduced, unlike its human subject. 

This mode of thinking resonates with the process Barthes followed in The Neutral. Barthes refuses to choose one side or the other (the living or the dead) because to do so would sacrifice meaning. He choses, the third term, the amorphous, the Neutral term, the zero degree, the image of the corpse, fluctuating between the states of life and death. The Neutral term becomes the zombie; it is thing, neither living nor dead, wandering, suspended. 

What does Blanchot’s reference to the Sirens mean?  It comes from an essay entitled The Song of the Sirens that is included within Blanchot’s  work The Book to Come. 

In Greek mythology, the Sirens were beautiful but dangerous creatures, half women and half bird. They lured sailors to their death on their island of Capri by singing their enchanting songs. In his Notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote of the Sirens: The siren sings so sweetly that she lulls the mariners to sleep; then she climbs upon the ships and kills the sleeping mariners.  

Joyce dedicated a chapter of Ulysses to the Sirens and describes the death of the sailors: A sail! A veil awave upon the waves. Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

To those who hear their songs, the Sirens brought wisdom and knowledge of the future but they also brought death. Homer writes in Ulysses:

Come hither, much-praised Odysseus, the great glory of the Achaeans; bring in your ship and hear us.  For no one has ever passed by in their black ship before he heard the honey-like sweetness from our lips, and went his way rejoicing and knowing more.  For we know all which on the plain of Troy the Argives and Trojans suffered by the will of the gods.  We know all that there is on the bounteous earth. 

Homer, The Odyssey

What knowledge would we desire more than knowledge of the future? The knowledge of the Siren’s song is illusory: of what use is knowledge if we are dead?

The Sirens sing of love and death: they sing of eros, the god of love, the sing of thanatos, the god of death, they sing of the most powerful psychological forces that compel us to dream, to desire and to act. They sing of the wisdom which makes us powerful and free but to hear such wisdom may mean we are to die in the deathly, erotic embrace of the Sirens. The beauty of the Sirens and their enchanting songs trigger such an overwhelming desire to possess them, to unite with them, that we follow them into the abyss, to our death. Blanchot describes the Song of the Sirens:

Is it through despair, then, that men passionate for their own song came to perish? Through a despair very close to rapture. There was something wonderful in this real song, this common, secret song, simple and everyday, that they had to recognize right away, sung in an unreal way by foreign, even imaginary powers, song of the abyss that, once heard, would open an abyss in each word and would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it. 

Maurice Blanchot, The Sirens’ Song

Blanchot takes the unusual position of calling Ulysses a coward because he wanted to hear the Song of the Sirens and gain their wisdom but he was unwilling to accept the consequences. He bound himself to the ship’s mast; he could hear the call of the Sirens but he could not experience the ecstasy of their embrace. He encounters the Sirens and yet he does not. 

The image is like a corpse, it is neither dead nor alive. It shows us the presence of the referent yet, at the same time it shows us its absence because it is not really here. The image is here but it is not here. 

The fascination of the Sirens lies in the tension between life and death, knowledge and ignorance, desire and frustration, song and silence. They present us with an extreme and powerful conflict. We cannot resist our overwhelming desire to embrace the Sirens, yet to do so turns us into corpses. We yearn for their embrace but we bind ourselves to the mast. We yearn for their embrace and yet we run away.  We yearn for their wisdom but to become enlightened is to die. 

Blanchot then reaches the point of his essay which is that the Song of the Sirens is a metaphor for the meaning of narrative.  He defines narrative as a description of the anticipation of a future event: “the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true.”  It is a voyage from the known present to an unknown future. Blanchot explains:

There is an obscure struggle underway between any narrative and the encounter with the Sirens, that enigmatic song that is powerful because of its defect. It is a struggle in which Ulysses’ prudence, whatever human truth there is in him-mystification, stubborn aptitude not to play the game of the gods-was always used and perfected. What we call the novel was born from this struggle. With the novel, the preliminary voyage is foregrounded, that which carries Ulysses to the point of encounter. 

Blanchot, Song of the Sirens

Narrative is the movement of a story to an imaginary place and time; we cannot foresee how the story will turn out. Ulysses desperately wants to hear the Song of the Sirens and receive their wisdom; he wants to experience the ultimate ecstasy of sexual union with the Sirens. But he also understands that to hear the Song is to die and end the narrative; after their embrace there would be no story left to tell. His challenge was to hear their Song and preserve his life at the same time. His clever solution was to bind himself to the mast; the result was the simultaneous experience of ecstasy and desire. But what about his crew?

The sailors would not deliberately chart a course to the Isle of Capri if they knew that it would result in their death. They would land at Capri only if they were lost of if they were ordered by Ulysses to take that course on their journey home. As the narrative unfolds, we  do not  know if the sailors will survive the Sirens or fall into their deathly embrace; we suspect they will die. We do not know of Ulysses’ clever solution to plug their ears with wax so they cannot hear the Song. Blanchot observes that the watchword of the voyage and it narrative was “silence, discretion, oblivion.” The silence of deafness, the oblivion of death if they hear, the discretion to not know. 

Let’s return to Blanchot’s quote as referenced by Barthes in Camera Lucida:

‘the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy, and yet more in-accessible and mysterious than the thought of the innermost being without signification, yet summoning up the depth of any possible meaning; unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens’ (Blanchot).

Roland Barthes, (quoting Blanchot), Camera Lucida

In this quote Blanchot is describing Proust’s writing process. Proust’s interior life is projected outward into his writing; his memories are transformed into a fixed reality (i.e., the written word) by his artistic process, even though the word is subject to interpretation by the reader. His interior life, his consciousness, is poured out into a writing. When we read Proust’s words, we experience them as images in our consciousness. These are the images that Blanchot is referring to in his quote rather than the photographic image.  These images may be more “inaccessible and mysterious” than our thoughts because they do not arise in our minds from our lived experience; rather they are unique images created in our minds by reading the written word.  Over time, we may not be able to discern the difference between the original images in our consciousness that are derived from our lived experience and those that our consciousness has constructed through the process of reading. These images may become superimposed like a double image or remixed into a new image which may become our fantasies or even our reality. We remain fascinated by the mystery of the illusion and the reality of mental images, however they may arise. 

Here is Blanchot’s complete quote that Barthes’ references in part:

But it is no longer a matter of applying psychology; on the contrary, there is no more interiority, for everything that is interior is deployed outwardly, takes the form of an image. Yes, at this time, everything becomes image, and the essence of image is to be entirely outside, without intimacy, and yet more inaccessible and more mysterious than the innermost thought; without signification, but summoning the profundity of every possible meaning; unrevealed and yet manifest, having that presence-absence that constitutes the attraction and the fascination of the Sirens. 

Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come

Barthes subverts Blanchot’s quote and uses it to make a point not even supported by the quote. Blanchot is referring to mental images stimulated by reading; Barthes uses the quote to support his views of the photographic image. Barthes is considering the distinction between camera obscura and camera lucida and whether it is more accurate to associate photography with camera obscura. He cites Blanchot to support his argument that camera lucida is more descriptive because the drawing device creates two images: one seen with the naked eye and one seen through the optical prism which is traced on the drawing paper. From the perspective of the observer’s eye, the image in the prism is “outside” and is somewhat mysterious because it is juxtaposed with the actual image seen with the eye. 

Barthes writes that the image is “certain” because we can observe the image with “intensity” as long as we wish and it provides evidence that the thing exists. It is more powerful and accurate than images produced by the written word because we have no way of verifying the quality of an image in the reader’s mind. Barthes then rather subtly modifies his assertion by observing that, even though the image is certain, it does not teach us anything because it resists or “arrests” any interpretation as to its meaning. 

Blanchot, on the other hand,  states that the image is inaccessible and mysterious because it comes from writing.  Proust does not place much faith in the power of photography to recall memory. Barthes quotes Proust in Camera Lucida: “I expected nothing from these ‘photographs of a being before which one recalls less of that being than by merely thinking of him or her.’ (Proust). For Proust, the madeleine and the imagination are superior to the photograph. 

The optical images from the world to my eyes, embedded in my memory as virtual images, fade and dissipate, the images embedded in the dark tunnel of my consciousness, floating in and out of focus, some highly resolved, others mere wisps and ethereal ghosts and still others, fragments, all images are a function of time, past and distant past, layers and accretions of the past, my consciousness splits: virtual images are superimposed upon optical images, like a negative that has been double exposed, like the twin images the artist sees when drawing with a camera lucida. A double image, one past, one present; one, the diaphanous virtual image, the other the present optical image, and yet, a third image arises, stimulate by the written word. More inputs into the circuits of mental imagery.  Images upon images, intermixed, breeding new  images. The Sirens become my muse. They draw me to the power of knowledge of the future. They fill me with an irresistible desire for wisdom and the little death. To die in the dream and to be reborn an artist with the power to write and to photograph the creation of my art. The Sirens fill me with fear, lust and longing.  I remember the image of the girl in Rio de Janeiro that came from David Allen Harvey’s book Based on a True Story: long black hair, slightly wet and sea salted, heat and sun, sand and sweat and skin and sea and salt. The melting popsicle. She is the Siren. She is the muse. Her Song is the genesis of my memories. The only escape, if escape I wish, is to become deaf, my ears of wax, and blind, my eyes shuttered, the image unexposed, negated. 

A. THE FOUR QUALITIES

Introduction-Phenomenology-Eidetic or Existential?

Barthes approaches his project of investigating the “eidos” of photography from a phenomenological point of view.  He is careful to state that he is “borrowing” something from its language and that, at his whim, he is free to distort and evade its principles, perhaps even take a vague and cynical approach. He is not concerned with intellectual rigor and doctrinal purity; he brings mourning, pathos and desire into the analysis. These types of statements in Camera Lucida are reverberations from his procedure described in The Neutral: it is not one or the other, it is not one and the other, nor is it neither, nor is it both.  Insight and truth lies within ambiguity, not in doctrinal positions that are hard, fixed and dualistic. 

Phenomenology is the study of consciousness as experienced from our subjective, first-person point of view.  It is the study of phenomena (things) as they appear to us and the meaning that we give to such phenomena. It explores our perception of “self” as we experience phenomena in the real time of our daily lives.  Phenomenology arose in the first half of the 20th century and was led by such thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,  Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida.  They considered phenomenology as the true foundation of all philosophy, rather than such systems as ethics, metaphysics or epistemology. 

There are two main branches of phenomenology: eidetic and existential. Eidetic phenomenology uses a thought experiment in which we imagine all of the variants or components -contingent, accidental or causal- that could possibly arise from a certain phenomenon. For each phenomenon, the phenomenologist asks the following question: “What is the essential element or experience that distinguishes this phenomenon from all other similar phenomenon?  We then eliminate all of the variants and the universal and essential form of the phenomenon remains.  We see past the particularity of lived experience and look toward the universal, essence or eidos that lies on the other side of the experience.  We see past the many and strive to find the one. Andrew Fisher describes the process of eidetic reduction as follows:

The eidetic reduction is supposed to strip away the contingent factors of experience: ‘The universal which first comes to  prominence in the empirically given must from the outset be freed  from its character of contingency.’ 

Andrew Fisher, Beyond Barthes: Rethinking the Phenomenology of Photography 

The essence of a phenomenon is a tentative claim that philosophers make that is similar to the hypothesis in the scientific method. What is identified as an essence may turn out  to be a variable upon further investigation.  The determination of an essence is always tentative, and open to revision and modification. Dr. Max Van Manen describes both the richness and the limitation of the eidetic process:

So the eidetic reduction is not a simplification, fixation, or contraction of the world into a system of fully resolved concepts- rather it is the exact opposite: the eidetic reduction makes the world appear as it precedes every cognitive construction: in its full ambiguity, irreducibility, contingency, mystery, and ultimate indeterminacy. 

Dr. Max Van Manen

To apply the eidetic reduction to photography we must ask ourselves what is the essential component or variant which will always remain after we eliminate all contingencies and variables from the photograph?  What are the elements of photography such that if we eliminate or vary each of those elements, the unchangeable essence of photography remains? What is the one essential thing that we can reduce a photograph to? For example, a triangle remains a triangle if one of its sides is extended or shortened but it ceases to be a triangle if a fourth side is added. This demonstrates that having three sides is essential to being a triangle, while having a specific side length is not essential. The essence of a triangle is having three sides. 

This raises the related questions of how we perceive photography and how does it affect our consciousness? What does a given photograph mean?  What attracts us to really enter into and experience a photograph? 

Barthes begins his phenomenological analysis by observing a paradox.  On the one hand he has the desire to discover and name photography’s essence and to “sketch an eidetic science” of photography.  He has a consuming desire to find the eidos of photography. On the other,  he has the feeling that photography is only a contingency that participates in “something or other”. This dependence upon another thing suggests that photography does not exist. If its existence is contingent upon a cause or condition, then phenomenology collapses. Photography subverts phenomenology. 

Barthes recognizes that phenomenology is not concerned with desire and mourning. He understands that he can apply an orthodox analysis of the eidos of photography by considering a network of “essences” of the photograph such as chemical, optical, aesthetics, history or sociology.  Before Barthes embarks on this traditional analysis he “branches off” into his desire to mourn, to resurrect and to identify his mother’s essence. His subjective emotions of desire and repulsion, and nostalgia and euphoria combined with overwhelming mourning subvert any attempt at objective analysis of the phenomenology of the image. Rather than reaching for photography’s essence, he stops, and acknowledges his desires, his grief, his sentiments.  He reduces photography to an image-object that inflicts a wound that in turn provides an opportunity for him to experience suffering. He sees, feels, observes and thinks. It is as if the intensity of his suffering overwhelms any chance of applying a rigorous, intellectual analysis of the problem that he poses in Camera Lucida. 

Barthes poses the central concern of Camera Lucida as discovering the eidos of photography; he dedicates the book to Sartre’s The Imaginary and borrows many concepts from Sartre. Accordingly,  we must consider the relationship between Camera Lucida, Sartre and phenomenology. Andrew Fisher observes:

Sartre’s continual play on metaphors of ‘adherence’ and ‘stickiness’, and his account of the forms of ‘emanation’ that characterize images for desiring consciousness, are central to the rhetorical construction of Barthes’s notion of photographic reference.

Barthes embarks upon a process of eidetic reduction in Camera Lucida. In Part I he states that he wants to learn at all costs what Photography is “in itself” and by what essential feature it is to be distinguished from the community of all images.  Barthes writes: Starting from a few personal impulses, I would try to formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography. At the conclusion of Part I Barthes admits that he has failed to find the answer to his question. He abandons his quest to find the eidos of photography. 

By applying the “eidetic science” to his quest to find the essence of photography, Barthes contracts the whole idea of a phenomenology of photography into eidetic phenomenology. Further, he uses the process of existential phenomenology as developed by Sartre.

The operation of eidetic phenomenology is to remove contingency. To apply it to photography is to imagine what causes and conditions support the existence of photograph and then to remove them; the essence of the photograph remains. Barthes, on the other hand, asserts that the eidos of the photograph is rooted in its contingency: it is never separate from its referent, it cannot stand alone, the photograph and its referent are glued together, like the windowpane and the landscape, the condemned man and the corpse. The photograph is “the sovereign contingency”. Fisher criticizes Barthes’ analysis in Camera Lucida as an inappropriate application of the eidetic method. 

The phenomenological method Barthes uses is not eidetic but existential. Fisher writes:

The critical issue here hinges on Barthes’s assertion that the categories of radical singularity and absolute specificity structure the phenomenology of photography. As shown above, it is this commitment that renders his eidetic theory of photography problematic. One of the main conclusions I want to draw from these considerations is that, whilst Camera Lucida is an emphatically eidetic phenomenology of photography, its construction is oriented to an existential analytic, which would be better addressed through an explicitly existential phenomenology. 

Since Sartre was a leader in the field of existential phenomenology and Barthes dedicates Cameral Lucida to Sartre’s The Imagination, it would have been more logical for Barthes to apply the principles of existential phenomenology to find the photography’s essence.  

Sartre was interested in what it means to be human being living in the world, rather than with the objects of the world, as such. He was concerned with consciousness itself and the objects of consciousness. He was oriented to the lived experience of an embodied human being living in the world. 

For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre’s method is in effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types of experience in relevant situations—a practice that does not really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger, but makes use of Sartre’s great literary skill.

David Woodruff Smith, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Phenomenology

As I noted previously, eidetic phenomenology is concerned with the discovery of essence: that which stands prior to and independent of particular objects in the world.  Sartre, on the other hand, famously remarked that “existence precedes essence.” Thus, Sartre rejects the notion of the eidetic reduction. This statement suggests that there is no such thing as human nature, since meaning is decided through the fact of existing in itself.  A person does not have an innate set of values that they are inherently structured to pursue; rather, the values that shape their behavior are the result of choices that they make living in the world. There are no fixed qualities that determine who we may become; rather, it it the choices and actions that we make in the world. This is similar to the Buddhist conception of emptiness. All things are “empty” of any sort of independent or intrinsic nature. Nothing is fixed, there are no fixed, intrinsic or permanent qualities; everything is subject to causes and condition. 

Barthes quote on his phenomenological approach to pursuing the essence of photography is instructive: 

In this investigation of Photography, I borrowed  something from phenomenology’s project and something from its language. But it was a vague, casual, even cynical phenomenology, so readily did it agree to distort or to evade its principles according to the whim of my analysis. First of all, I did not escape, or try to escape, from a paradox: on the one hand the desire to give a name to Photography’s essence and then to sketch an eidetic science of the Photograph; and on the other the intractable feeling that Photography is essentially (a contradiction in terms) only contingency, singularity, risk: 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

He begins by stating that his desire is to sketch an eidetic science of the photograph but immediately recognizes that photography is essentially contingent upon its referent. Thus, he undercuts the initial question that he poses for himself; the eidetic negates the contingent.  He observes that classical phenomenology does not embrace such emotional polarities as desire and repulsion or nostalgia and euphoria, much less mourning. He reverts back to the eidetic analysis by observing that photography may have many essences such as material (optical and chemical) or regional ( deriving from aesthetics, history or sociology) but before examining those essences he “branches off” from the path of formal logic and experiences grief and pathos. Do we see confusion between existential and eidetic phenomenology, the taking of ambiguous positions, Barthian oscillation, the mixing of traditions, or the collapse of intellectual rigor caused by a clouded state of mind wrapped up in mourning?  Or is something else going on here? Fisher concludes that Barthes approach is fundamentally existential but that he mistakenly labels it eidetic. 

As we will see later in this work, in The Neutral Barthes rejects the whole notion of binaries and creates a framework which baffles or outplays the paradigm which is a binary. Rather than accepting or rejecting one side of the binary or the other (perhaps eidetic or existential in phenomenological terms) which always results in a loss of meaning, he seeks to find meaning in between the oppositions. He is seeking the neutral term rather than an “A” and a “B” or neither an “A” nor a “B”. Examples are neutrally charged bodies in physics, the neutral solutions in chemistry or the androgynous in sexuality. The operation of the neutral is unstable and thus may yield contradictory meanings. In The Neutral Barthes writes: The Neutral-my Neutral-can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. “To out play the paradigm” is an ardent, burning activity. 

Barthes, of course, in the spirit of The Neutral, likes to have it neither way and both ways. Part One of Camera Lucida is generally eidetic and Part Two generally existential. In Chapter 1 Barthes proclaims that he has an “ontological” desire to find the essential feature of photography, what it is “in itself”; its “special genius”. In Chapter 8 he notes that he intends to employ a casual, cynical phenomenological process to pursue his project of finding the essence of photography. His desire is to find its “eidetic science”.  But this view is compromised or neutralized by observing in the very same paragraph that his interest is only “sentimental” and that he wants to explore the question as a wound rather than as a question or as a theme. In the last chapter of Part I he concedes defeat; he has not been able to find the eidos of photography and decided that one cannot find the universal through a hedonistic project. In the first chapter of Part II, Barthes begins by looking through old photographs hoping to find his mother; rather than doing this in the spirit of a philosophical inquiry Barthes actions are catalyzed by loss, memory and mourning. He desperately misses her “being” and want to recognize, reconstruct, perhaps resurrect his mother through the image and he does just that in the famous Winter Garden Photograph. He confronts the photograph and what does he see, what does he feel? Barthes writes:

Here again is the Winter Garden Photograph. I am alone with it, in front of it. The circle is closed, there is no escape. I suffer, motionless. Cruel, sterile deficiency: I cannot transform my grief, I cannot let my gaze drift; no culture will help me utter this suffering which I experience entirely on the level of the image’s finitude (this is why, despite its codes, I cannot read a photograph) : the Photograph-my Photograph- is without culture: when it is painful, nothing  can transform grief into mourning. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

In Part II we see the search for the mother, memory of the mother,  loss and mourning, photographers as agents of death, time as the wound (stigmata) and the photograph as a madness or hallucination, illusion or reality. All of this is existential rather than eidetic. Barthes entire experience of the loss of his mother presents an existential dilemma: is he willing to reconstruct his life, to create new meaning or if not, simply to die?

All of this is yet another example of Barthes’ process articulated in The Neutral of constructing and then playing with the dualities and the spaces within; it is his ode/palinode, eidetic/existential method of discourse. Barthes, the coyote, the trickster, the shaman, points both ways: to the eidetic reduction and to existential phenomenology.

Studium and Punctum-Introduction

Barthes looks at a series of photographs and discovers that interesting images have the co-presence of “two discontinuous elements.”  These are elements that do not belong in the same frame such as nuns and soldiers, a child’s corpse and mourning parents. Based upon his feeling about these types of photographs, Barthes develops the two themes of photography: studium and punctum.  He offers several variations on these themes as Camera Lucida progresses. 

The studium is the generalized cultural field in which the photograph exists and in which we may take a general or casual interest in the photograph but “without special acuity”. The studium is a “polite” interest in the photograph; it does not move us in an emotional way. We may like or enjoy the photograph but we do not love or passionately embrace it. It does not cause bliss or pain. 

The punctum is the detail in a photograph that stimulates a painful response in the observer. It is an element in the photograph that, like an arrow, shoots us in the heart. The photograph is the bow, the punctum is the arrow and the target is our heart. The arrow pierces the heart; we are wounded. The punctum may goes even further: it may provoke a “tiny shock” which Barthes likens to  the passage of the void in the Zen state of satori.

Barthes observes that some photographs are, like haiku, “undevelopable”. This reference is obscure but it seems to rise from the notion that haiku stops thought by setting up a gap between word and image that short-circuits the logical or analytical processes of the mind. This leads to a still mind which is the goal of any Zen practice.  

The Chord of Photography

Since the publication of Camera Lucida, punctum and studium have become the standard framework for exploring the meaning of photography. A large body of academic commentary has evolved around these two concepts because of Barthes’ ambiguous and inconsistent explication of these concepts in Camera Lucida. In the Introduction to Photography Ground Zero, Geoffrey Batchen writes:

Indeed, we found we could rarely write an essay on photography without having first to pay our respects to the ideas and vocabulary established by Roland Barthes. And so it has been for many other scholars too; this is surely the most quoted book in the photographic canon.

Geoffrey Batchen, Photography Ground Zero

Further, Professor James Elkins observes:

Camera Lucida is both scapegoat and touchstone, marginal and model. It is cited in passing, trivially; but it’s also pondered at  length. For many people, it is too familiar to re-read, but it is still taught in college classes. At one moment it seems intensely scholarly, and in the next refreshingly free of academic pomp. It is  understood as part of the history of postwar art theory, but it is also taken as a source of insight into photography. 

James Elkins, What Photography Is

We cannot condense the vibrant, complex and evolutionary medium of photography with its high velocity of artistic and technological change to Barthes’ binary and reductive system of punctum and studium, even with its fuzzy boundaries and fluctuating meanings. The reduction of such a complex and evolutionary phenomena as photography to a simple duality fails.  This duality was an over-simplified and subjective system when Barthes conceived it in Camera Lucida in 1980 and it is even less relevant today.

Ironically, Barthes did not use the process he established in his book The Neutral to “outplay” and “frustrate” the binary of studium and punctum and to derive new meanings in the spaces in between and outside of the binary.  Even though The Neutral was written before Camera Lucida, Barthes did not use its framework  for working with the binaries in Camera Lucida to find the deeper meaning of photography.  It seems that Barthes abandoned much of his earlier thinking when he wrote Camera Lucida, perhaps because his real purpose was to use the book as a memorial to his mother and to use photographs as a way to resurrect his mother.

My personal reaction to a detail in a particular photograph (which another observer may not notice at all) says nothing about the essence of all photographs.  The notion of punctum is too narrow, subjective and emotionally limited to be a useful concept. This is also true for studium: my indifference to the banality of a photograph or my lack of engagement only describes my personal reaction to the image; it does not point to its essence. The particular within an image does not lead to the universal quality of all images. 

At the end of Part One of Camera Lucida, Barthes concedes that his desires, pleasures and that his subjectivity reduced to a “hedonistic project” could never find the nature (the eidos) of photography.  He writes Part Two as a palinode to look more deeply within himself to find the answer. After he discovers the Winter Garden Photograph, he largely abandons his quest and shifts his focus in Part Two to writing a memorial to his mother and mourning over his loss. 

In the last Chapter of Camera Lucida, he abandons the duality of studium and punctum and introduces a new one in the form of a question that we are left to answer: is the photograph a perfect illusion or intractable reality? This is a more robust and interesting framework from which to search for the essence of photography than the punctum/studium duality because it points to a more universal experience on the part of an observer; however, Barthes leaves resolution of the question to the reader. Interestingly, most commentators ignore this more robust framework and focus on studium/punctum. 

Barthes compares his use of studium and punctum to a classical sonata:

“Having thus distinguished two themes in Photography (for in general the photographs I liked were constructed in the manner of a classical sonata), I could occupy myself with one after the other.”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

However, a two note symphony would be limiting and dull indeed. We need at least four notes to create a composition that is complex enough to fully capture photography’s essence.  In his Fifth Symphony Beethoven created a masterpiece  through complex transformations of just four notes. I will add two notes to our composition: admodum and silentium.  

Admodum are the endless flow of images that stream across our digital screens: the phones, the devices, the computers, the television sets and movie screens. It also represents the billboards, signs and flashing lights; all promoting, advertising and selling. They permeate every surface of the landscape; they attack our consciousness, they scream for our attention, they assault us, they manipulate us.  We cannot escape. They are toxic. They are visual noise, optical pollution that disturbs our sense of well-being. They are intended to stimulate desire and frustration, or revulsion and outrage and then they use our emotional responses to influence and control our behavior.  These are so pervasive that we do not even notice they are influencing our thoughts. 

Silentium are contemplative images. They are peaceful; they suggest silence, stillness and quiet. They may be abstract images. They may be timeless.  They do not suggest death, time or memory. They do not provoke desire and frustration, pleasure or displeasure or attraction or revulsion. They do not manipulate or sell to us. They do not pierce or wound us. They do not stimulate suffering or incite an emotional response. They still our minds; they support our meditations and help us unite with the source. 

Studium

Studium: An image that is closed and obvious. A soft image that does not resolve into intellectual or emotional acuity.  A unary image. A banal image. A photograph that only causes a casual or general interest of the observer. 

Barthes uses the term studium to describe those photographs that give him an “average feeling.” Studium describes the quality of the interest that we have in a photograph. It is modest and polite.  We may like the image but we do not love the image.  The image provokes only a slight desire, never a passion.  We may see the photograph but we do not observe it, study it or spend the time to interact with it.  We glance casually at the image without any investment of our time to understand its meaning or appreciate its pictorial language. These images do not move us, interest us, provoke us or stimulate us. They do not  intrigue. They do not trigger our memories; they do not bring us longing or pain. They lack visual interest, artistic composition or concept. 

What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Professor Elkins describes studium:

What matters is the usual state of photography, which means those many photographs that don’t particularly work, that fail to sting our inner thoughts, that don’t help us preserve our treasured memories, don’t offer any useful information, and aren’t especially edifying, noteworthy, curious, disturbing, cute, awe-inspiring, kitschy, skillful, delightful, or entertaining.   

James Elkins, What Photography Is 

We see these photographs “without special acuity.” We do not see them in high resolution or with focus on an interesting detail. It is almost as if the photograph, or perhaps our reaction to the photograph, is in soft focus or blurred. The studium may cause us to engage with the photographer and the image but not to the extent that we become passionate or emotionally invested. We remain dispassionate, analytical and reserved in our reaction. 

Studium includes the most widespread type of photograph in the world: the unary photograph. Barthes observes that news photographs and pornography are often unary photographs. Barthes makes this cryptic observation:

The Photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms “reality” without doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion): no duality, no indirection, no disturbance. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

A unary photograph simply records reality without ambiguity. It conveys information; many news photographs are unary.  Their role is descriptive; they are closed images; they typically do not contain ambiguities nor artistic qualities. They have little artistic quality to entice us to stop and spend time to look at them.  Some unary photographs shout at us or attempt to manipulate us but they do not pierce our heart, they do not penetrate our defenses, they do not stimulate the circuits of memory. I am not interested in unary photographs; they do not transform reality in some interesting way or open my eyes to realities that I did not know exit; they merely reproduce an image of an event. I do not stop and study them nor do I care to spend time to uncover the photographer’s intention. I glance at them and turn the page. They are not worth my time. They have no ambiguity, no mystery, no detail that sparks my emotions or interest.

Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me) I understood at once that existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world (no need to proceed to the point of contrast): the soldiers and the nuns.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Punctum-General 

Punctum: A detail or element within the photograph that causes a wound, pain, loss, a sting, a cut, a prick or a bruise.

If studium means that we see and experience the photograph the same way as everyone else within our culture, then punctum means that I am alone in what I see.  I am the only person who is affected by a detail in the photograph. Some observers may not notice the detail at all and others may see the detail but may not be moved. Punctum is the detail that causes me emotional pain.

This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole-and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me is, poignant to me). 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida p 27

If the studium is the general field of culture, the punctum is the “unexpected flash” that crosses the field. It is like the arc of a falling star across the night sky. The flash may inflict a psychological wound on the observer; perhaps the most powerful wounds are those that spark death, time and memory.  If a photograph shows someone who is alive today they will die in the future. If they are already dead, then the photography stimulates painful memories.  Either way, Barthes calls this an emotional catastrophe. Studium never inflicts suffering; if the studium is average, the punctum is extraordinary. Because Barthes’ analysis of photography’s essence is colored by his loss and mourning, he does not consider that punctum could also be a detail that sparks positive emotions such as joy, love beauty and union with spirit, nature or the beloved. 

Punctum As the Boats

Derrida wrote: 

It pierces, strikes me, wounds me, bruises me, and seems to concern only me. Its very definition is that it addresses itself to me. The absolute singularity of the other addresses itself to me, the Referent that, in its very image, I can no longer suspend, even though its “presence” forever escapes me-having already receded into the past.

Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning

Punctum is like an arrow shot into my heart by the photograph. The tip of the arrow is a detail in the image that the photographer did not intend to capture and perhaps did not even see. The detail wounds only me; I cannot escape the pain. I have no shield to protect me.  

The boats in Amsterdam’s canals are my punctum. They submerge into the water, decompose and sink into the muck in the bottom of the canal. Wood becomes water; water becomes air, air becomes cloud, cloud becomes water: transformation. Decayed wood, metal, muck, trash. Green algae and chains. Immersed in the mystery of the black water of the canal. For me, the punctum is not the detail; it is the whole image and the memories it trigger that haunt and wound me. 

It is the old tennis shoe floating in the murky black water in the bottom of the boat that disturbs me. Is it because I played tennis in college and it resurrects memories of my college days, with its passions, chaos and broken hearts? Of Connie, my first love, another tennis player, lost in death, time and memory?  Or is it because there is just a single shoe and its suggestion of loss and incompleteness? When you look at this photograph, the tennis shoe means nothing to you; it is not your punctum, it is only mine. 

I walk along the canals and look for dead boats to photograph. I remember walking along  these same canals last year and the year before. I find a boat, photograph it and continue my search.  Months later, I edit my prints of the boats. I did not see many of the details of the boats when I took the photographs.  I only see the details after the photographs are printed and I have studied them closely.  I see the torn label on the beer can, the paper in the shadow, the blue rubber on the side of the tennis shoe, the frayed strand of rope floating in the water in the bottom of the boat, the red heart stenciled on the bow, the ropes that imprison the boat. These details animate the images; they create emotional resonance. They trigger memories of the day that I took the photographs. I remember the canals and the clouds. The sounds of bicycle bells in the distance, the clang of the trams, and the smell of the stagnant canal water. The reflections of the red brick canal houses, the trees and the clouds, shimmering upside down. I remember my loss and loneliness. I cannot remain remote and unaffected by these images. The beer can label, the tennis shoe, the frayed rope, the red heart on the bow of the boat, the ropes that bind; these are the arrows that pierce me.

Punctum is a sting, a cut, a wound.

Punctum is an arrow that pierces the heart. 

Punctum is emotion.  Punctum is suffering. 

Punctum is death.  Punctum is time.  Punctum is memory.

They are my punctum. They mean nothing to you. 

All photographers die. All images die. All people in photographs die. All observers die. All memories within the photographs die. The boats are the catalyst for my exploration of death, time, and memory.  I am  consumed with these questions.  Like Barthes, I have no choice. Unlike Barthes, I hope to find a way out. 

I show you my photographs of the boats. I am the archer. I want to shoot you in the heart with the arrows of my images. I want my photographs to catalyze your emotions. I want your attention: your time is your most important asset and I want it. I want to wound you, to move you,  with my photographs. If my arrows miss their target, if you do not respond with your attention, if you are not moved, I have failed. 

Punctum as Death and Time

But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Punctum has another quality: time.  In Part Two of Camera Lucida, Barthes writes that punctum is the “lacerating emphasis of the noeme  (“that has been”)”.  Punctum may be a quality (rather than a detail) that lacerates the observer: the jagged wound. The photograph of Lewis Payne is evidence of time’s victory.  Payne was going to be hanged for treason two weeks after the photograph was taken, the photograph anticipated his death. He was hanged and he is dead. In this photograph, Barthes sees a man who was alive when the photograph was taken, will be dead two weeks later, and who is dead now (when Barthes looked at the photograph). The manacles on the wrists, the welds of the metal walls of the ship’s prison, the haunted eyes. Death is the most painful of our wounds. We feel dread and fear of the loss of the beloved and of ourselves. In this image Barthes sees his own death.  He is pierced to the heart by death and time, fear and loss. 

I look at one of my photographs of a boat in a canal in Amsterdam. The boat floats on a black field and it is slowly sinking. The field may be water or it may be the void. It may be the singularity at the center of the labyrinth. The field reflects dead leaves, ropes, the round mass of the hull, partially submerged in the water. The boat recedes into the past: lost, decomposed into water.  Punctum is the black field upon which the boat floats. 

There was a time when the boat floated on the water. It transported people to the other shore.  Now it is dead: abandoned, submerged, useless. It is decaying. This photograph will disintegrate in time. All will be consumed in the fires of time. The goddess Kali destroys all with her scimitar.

Time punctures the heart. Time is the wound.  Everything disintegrates in time. When we lose what we love, we feel sorrow.  We cannot let it go. We are so desperate for union with the beloved that we grasp a dead photograph to our hearts. The photograph is never the beloved; we cannot hallucinate the beloved back into existence through image. The photograph is only an object that stimulates memory.  Memory is just as impermanent as the photograph.  Memory fantasizes and fades.  Memory never resurrects. 

Time passing is my life passing. My losses, my failures, my memories, my regrets, my declining strength and my loss of potential.  I photograph to stop my life from passing away.  To make permanent that which is not permanent. To grasp which cannot be grasped, to hold the now tightly. To hold form ripped from the emptiness to my heart. 

The photograph is evidence “that I have lived” and “that I have loved.”  But I know this is illusion, it is a game. I experience photographs with sadness and melancholy. The image is an illusion, its permanency is a falsehood, and my memory is unstable.  Memory grows dim as my retinas grow dim. Memory  mixes with fantasy.  Photographs certify that everyone dies in time and everything disintegrates in time. Photographs certify loss and sorrow. Lost beauty and union with the beloved.  Photographs certify death, time and memory. We know this to be true but we do not face it. 

Camera Lucida is an attempt to resurrect the mother through memory that is supported by a photograph.  The mother is not resurrected. The sorrow and the mourning is not released.  It ends with an unanswered question. Sisyphus pushes the boulder to the top of the mountain. Barthes dies.  

Punctum is death, time and memory as provoked by a photograph. 

Punctum As Memory

I have no photographs of the Pacific Beach that existed when Valerie and I walked through the long shafts of light that  flooded the gaps between the buildings and cast heavy jagged shadows across the alleyways and on the walls of the houses silent and deserted and we turned and saw the surfers paddling back to shore on the golden pathway after catching the last folding fall of the wave.  We stand in stillness and wait for the sunset and the green flash and the coming of the night. 

I photograph Pacific Beach now.  I desire to resurrect my memories of Valerie, to reconstruct that time and place. Remembrance wounds me. Why must I return to these memories again and again?

She sits on her bicycle leaning slightly forward, long black hair falling across her jersey, bright blue eyes and smile, golden sun waves background. It is an old photograph: bent, stained, faded. I put it aside but my memories persist; they are not so easily discarded. 

Why do I keep looking at these old photographs? To bring my past suffering into the present so that I can experience it again and again? To amplify my suffering? To relish my melancholia? Why do I perpetuate my suffering, why do I not release it? How do I tear up  memories, time and loss?  

We hold the photographs close to our hearts to keep our beloved alive forever. We seek to rescue the beloved from death, time and memory. We seek to prevent loss, decay and suffering. We want our time with the beloved to be eternal, permanent and unchanging.  We want to freeze our happiness in time, to make it permanent. Perhaps this is why photography is so important; it is a memorial to our happiness. If we are sad now, the photograph helps us look back to experience when we were happy.  It turns reality into a fantasy and we would rather have the fantasy.  We know the photograph is not true, we know it is a lie but we are obsessed; we must photograph everything, to capture the past in amber so we can view it like a prehistoric insect trapped in time’s amber. What I once desired at the cellular level has been lost and no photograph can resurrect it. When I allow the photograph to tell me the truth, the image amplifies my loss.  

Photography never resolves suffering because we do not accept the universal truth of impermanence. All universes disintegrate in time. All forms arise from emptiness and collapse back into emptiness. Everything lives, grows and dies in time. Accept this truth. 

The Buddhist way is to accept impermanence as a universal law.  Nothing has a fixed center, the existence of a thing is always dependent upon causes and conditions that change and are themselves unstable and impermanent. There is no fundamental particle from which everything is made. There is no fixed center to our self. The cause of the wound, the piercing of the heart is the failure to accept the principle of impermanence. The way is to accept the loss and to work with our suffering to gain wisdom and compassion to live peacefully and to help other beings resolve their suffering.  Consider this.  Accept punctum.  Even though Barthes wrote frequently about Buddhist themes, he did not find the way. 

Admodum: The Quality of Toxicity and Assault

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.

Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture

Admodum: the visual assault of toxic images.  Advertising and media that seek to manipulate my behavior. The cliche, the banal, the trite, the failed; images without visual or conceptual interest. They do not wound but they may provoke rejection, protection and hostility. 

We live in a world made of images. The world is disappearing behind the veil of images. Images mediate my perception of the world. Images have become so pervasive and addictive that they have melded into the “real” world and created a virtual world. Some people view the world through the cameras of their iPhones and see augmented reality superimposed upon the world. Some walk the streets of New York and see nothing but the screens of their iPhones; they are not present in the here and now. As I walk the New York streets I see images everywhere: on buildings, billboards, walls, windows, subways, taxis, buses, newspapers, magazines, even in the sky on airplanes and blimps. Signs, advertisements and branding cover every imaginable surface.  Images scroll in an endless stream from huge video monitors from the tops of buildings. Monitors set within columns on the sidewalks broadcast more ads at street level. Images stream perpetually on my four screens (phone, computer, tablets and television). Every second users take millions of images and instantly share them with their followers. They are a visual cacophony: shrieking, deceptive, manipulative, invasive. They are psychologically dissonant and provoke my hostility. 

I shield myself from these images. I protect my emotional response.  I do not want my memories or emotions to be triggered or manipulated. I do not want to be pierced or wounded.  I do not want to be penetrated. I do not want to exchange value with the producers of these images. I do not want to engage them in a casual way; I do not want to understand their intention.  I do not have a polite or general interest in these images.  They are visual  pollution. I protect myself from the assault of toxic images. I shield myself. 

I resist. I do not want your sponsored content. I do not want to know your brand. I do not want to be manipulated by your celebrities and influencers. I do not want your corporate-engineered lifestyle nor do I want to pay you to advertise your brand. I do not want to purchase your products. I do not want to be delighted. I do not want to share or comment or review your product. You assault my consciousness and manipulate my behavior.  I do not want a dialogue with you. I reject the toxicity of your images that you want attempt to inject into my consciousness  for your profit. I protect my well-being from your invasion.  I shield myself from admodum.

I only see the surface of the images, I let them flow through me. I am unattached.  I do not grasp them; they are superficial.  I want them dead, I do not want them to come to life. I want to remain unaffected, insulated.  It is not a matter of liking or not liking the images as Barthes suggested; it is a matter of avoidance and aversion. They are like trash on the sidewalk. They are toxic. I detest them and I struggle to escape them. I conserve my attention, my time and my energy.  

Silentium- The Quality of Timeless and Still  Images

Silentium: contemplative photographs that still the mind. Images of silence, of samadhi, of the sublime. Images that  do not stimulate death, time or memory. Silentium are empty. They have no form. They do not disturb. They are silent. 

Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:

drink at the source and speak no word.

Live in your inner self alone

within your soul a world has grown,

the magic of veiled thoughts 

that might be blinded by the outer light,

drowned in the noise of day, unheard… 

take in their song and speak no word. 

 Fyodor Tyutchev, Silentium

I contemplate photographs with the quality of silentium. Mind stills, time stops, ego drops, world falls away, small mind moves to big mind. Still mind, timeless mind, big mind, Zen mind. Silentium. The doorway to Spirit. 

Photographs with the quality of silentium do not affect me emotionally, they do not wound me. They do not stimulate my memory nor remind me of death. They do not engage my interest in discerning the photographer’s intentions. They do not reflect contemporary culture. They are not signs. They do not move me to like or dislike them. They do not sell, offend or pollute. They do not trigger an intellectual response. 

They do not provoke me nor attempt to manipulate me. They are not a catalyst that stimulates my reactivity.

Photographs with the quality of silentium do not represent. They are abstract, non-representational images. They are quiet images. They are not about movement and they are not about time. They are not about death. They exist out of time: they do not look back to the past and trigger memories, mourning and loss. They do not look to the future and stimulate fantasies. 

Photographs with the quality of silentium support my mediations. They still the turnings of my mind, they help expand my awareness and transform my consciousness. They help me move from small mind to big mind. With a still mind I can realize unity with Spirit. 

Meditation is the continuous flow of concentration toward a spiritual object or image. Silentium supports meditation. When I contemplate silentium my inner voices become silent, my ordinary mind is dropped. As the constriction of my consciousness relaxes, my awareness expands. The gap between myself and the image collapses, and I enter into a state of deep absorption in the image. I am in the state of samadhi; I have realized the Self. In the Upanishads, it is written that:

One who meditates upon and realizes the Self discovers that everything in the cosmos – energy and space, fire and water, name and form, birth and death, mind and will, word and deed, mantram and meditation-all come from the Self.

For the Self, all dualities resolve, time and memory collapse into the present, and eternal life manifests over death.  

There are many photographers who make photographs with the quality of silentium.

Consider Wolfgang Tillman’s series of photographs entitled “Impossible Color.” They are abstract works that are made without cameras and use pure light to create images from darkroom experiments. The colors are diaphanous washes, unearthly and ghostly, manipulations of light, almost as if the colors were made from light dust. They represent nothing that exists in the physical world. I contemplate them. There is nothing for my mind to hook onto, nothing to stimulate memory or emotion, nothing to create a narrative that spins my mind.

Consider Hiroshi Sugimoto’s  photo book “Joe.” It is a series of black and white photographs of a large, rust-colored steel sculpture created by Richard Serra. The photographs suggest glowing moons against the black void of space, planes of light and dark, and spiral forms. Three dimensions are reduced to two, hard steel is transformed into soft paper.  Soft planes of light and dark, blurred boundaries, indistinct edges: what do they represent? The referent is obscure, ambiguous, veiled. There is nothing that I can recognize, nothing in the known world to grasp. The images are not a catalyst for emotion or intellect. They do not spark death, time or memory. They exist in the crack between the worlds. Light and dark, positive and negative space, time and timelessness, liminal states, blurred boundaries. Outside and inside stand in ambiguous relationship. These images are still. They are silentium. 

Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention-and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. The beginnings of life  are shrouded in myth: Let there be water and air.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Consider Sugimoto’s series of Seascapes. These photographs are subtle gradients of grey tones. There is no border between the tone, only a subtle and ambiguous blending of sea and sky, water and air. Grey forms. 

Where were these images taken? When were they taken?  They exist out of time; they do not suggest the past, the present or the future. Without time, there is no death. They do not trigger memories. They anchor me in the present. They still my mind. They support my meditations. They embody the mysterious art that creates a strong “spiritual atmosphere” as Wassily Kandinsky wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Consider Rothko’s paintings in the Rothko Chapel. They are large, rectangular fields of thin layers of purple and black paint that absorb and reflect light. It is difficult to see the boundaries of the rectangles or to distinguish the black from the purple layers. These paintings represent nothing. They mean nothing. They are a vision of emptiness. They do not trigger death, time or memory.  I sit before them. Time slows. Sun moves, light flows, colors shift, boundaries float. It takes time to encounter them, to absorb them. My mind becomes still, my awareness expands. In this state of pure moment awareness the universe is a shimmering field of purple and black color.  I fall into the void, the emptiness, the well of silence, the eternal now. I am Spirit. 

Consider Agnes Martin’s paintings in the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico. The shape of the Martin Gallery suggests the circular structure of a Native American kiva, the sacred ceremonial space or perhaps a monastic cell, with its aura of mystery and solitude and contemplation. While the Rothko Chapel is dark and somber, the Martin Gallery is light and joyful. The paintings are white grids. The expansiveness of the white field makes these paintings feel pure, transcendent and sublime. They vibrate. They do not represent; there contain no referent. The grids are flat, ordered and geometrical; they are unnatural. They do not create the illusion of volume and space. The regularity of their structure defeats representation. They do not create a narrative. They do not wound us emotionally, they do not participate in contemporary culture, they do not sell anything to us. They are quiet. Timeless. They are of another world. They are objects in a sacred space that stop time and memory, they defeat death, they exist in the eternal now. They elevate us to encounter Spirit.

The paintings of Rothko and Martin exist as three-dimensional image-objects. They have no referent: they are not dependent upon a referent to establish their existence or their meaning. They do not testify that something has existed in the past or that it was true.  They do not suggest death, time or memory.  They are empty. They are timeless. They are without form. The grid is the expression of the aesthetic of the sublime. According to Rosalind Krauss:

Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. As such, the grid has done its job with striking efficiency. 

Rosalind Krauss, Grids

Silentium are timeless images.

They are neither inside time nor outside time. 

They stop time. 

They stop mind.

They open me to Spirit.

Imagine that I photograph these paintings by Rothko and Martin, enlarge them to the same scale and frame them the same way. The paintings are thin and flat; they read as two dimensional objects just like photographs; the only distinction is the difference in the quality of the light reflecting from a canvass or a photograph. However, this effect could be equalized by printing the photographs on heavy, rough paper and framing them like the paintings. There would be no transformation from a three dimensional object into a two dimensional image which is fundamental to the making of a photograph. Does this process transform the photograph into a three-dimensional object so that it is like the painting which is its source, thereby questioning whether it is a photograph or not? Or does it transform a three dimensional painting into a two dimensional object, thereby questioning whether it is a painting or not?

The Surprise: The Essential Gesture

Barthes writes in Camera Lucida that the essential gesture of the photographer is to surprise. A surprise is something that provokes a mild astonishment or a shock. It is the revealing of something that is hidden that is not seen at first. To attract the attention of the observer, the photograph must contain an element of visual interest. To surprise is to attract. Otherwise, the observer will dismiss the image with a glance.

Barthes lists five categories of surprise: (i) rare subjects (freaks) (ii) freezing motion, the rare gesture (a woman jumping out of window); (iii) prowess (scientific photos, electron microscopes; cosmology, high frame rates, etc.); (iv) contortions of technique (photoshop; framing, etc.); and (v) the lucky find (street photography, the natural scene).  To surprise is to defeat an expectation or anticipation in the mind of the observer. To create a surprising photograph, the photographer must defy the laws of probability and find the unique photograph that somehow sets up an expectation in the mind of the observer and then defeats, reverses or twists that expectation. 

A photographer must capture the notable to surprise the observer. However, through a clever reversal, the photographer then decrees that whatever has been photographed is indeed notable. Barthes writes that the quality of “anything whatever” becomes the peak “acme of value.”  The logic collapses; every photograph becomes notable which means that no photograph is notable. But what of those photographs that have the quality of silentium, that are not intended to surprise, that are quiet and contemplative, that are not notable and that do not replicate any known referent? These are outside of the paradigm of surprise and notability; they do not show us an image; their purpose is not to surprise but to still. 

What Is Photography? Seen or Unseen in Amsterdam

Through all of this, the question ‘What is photography?’ echoes even more insistently – and impossibly-than ever. At Unseen 2015, photography is, among other things, performance, fiction, memoir, sculpture, storytelling, book making, remixing, installation, animation, deconstruction, psychogeography, politics, still life, the archive, digital rendering… as well as documentary, landscape and portraiture. 

Sean  O’Hagan, 2015 Unseen Magazine

Each year I attend the Unseen Photography Festival in Amsterdam.  Unseen explores and debates new developments in photography with an emphasis on young talent. It emphasizes photography books, installations, interventions, deconstructions and new forms that freeing the photograph from the constraint of two-dimensionality. 

One important theme in Unseen is the impact that living in an image saturated world has on society and on ourselves. We are overwhelmed with a flood of images that we do not want to see. Images are shared, re-mixed, re-made and re-contextualized. We are blinded by the visual noise generated by the operation of the commercial machine. They are like a malignant electrical hum in the background of our lives. 

To quote Sean O’Hagen who wrote the introduction to the 2015 Unseen magazine:

Indeed, if one wanted to identify a touchstone for the spirit of contemporary photography, it would be an artist of ideas like John Baldessari rather than a photographer like Henri Cartier-Bresson- or, indeed Robert Frank or even Jeff Wall. It is Baldessari’s perpetually mischievous mind that informs, unconsciously or otherwise, most of the work on show at Unseen, where ideas come thick and fast and not always fully formed in photographs. It is both a statement against the endless production of images that float free and unmoored in our digitized universe, constantly transmitted, but either relatively unseen or instantly forgotten. 

When Unseen poses the question: “What Is Photography?”  it is seeking to explore and understand the impact that photography is having on our society, our culture and ourselves. The question has now become “What is photography doing to us”?  This is an entirely different question than that posed by Barthes; he was searching for the essential thing that makes the photograph different from all other images. He found that the photograph adheres to its referent and documents its existence, inevitably points to death, loss and mourning and exists in tension between illusion and reality. Today, we cannot accept such a reductive view. The endless flood of images flowing through our consciousness is manipulating our behavior, redefining our reality and affecting us in ways we do not yet understand. The impact of the image has become inseparable from the tectonic changes that the technological revolution has made in society and in our individual lives. Social media is pervasive, it is a powerful driver of our lifestyles, our political views, our consumption, our personal feelings of well-being and our emotional states; social media is driven by the photograph. To be a passive observer of the image without understanding the intent of the image makers and the impact is has on our society and lives is to do so at our peril.

Photography has changed the role of memory. We no longer need to remember the events of our past; we only need to photograph our past and find the photographs in our databases if we wish to remember the past. Our phones have become an extension of our lives, they have create a new sense, the sixth sense, the ability to record our lives as images in real time. We photograph every significant event in our lives and upload the images into the network. The network organizes our photographs by genre, date and location. We no longer resurrect our memory through writing, reflection, reverie and repose, we remember by discovering our photographs in social media accounts, databases, digital storage accounts and links in our browsers. Our archives of memory grow larger and more disorganized each day. Memory is not reflection and recall; it is archival and search. 

I reflect on my experiences at the Unseen Photography Festival in Amsterdam over the years and this is what I have seen:

I have seen photo books designed as scrolls, fold-outs, post cards and multiple volumes. 

I have seen photographs displayed as installations on wrecked cars, on wooden crates, projected on buildings, plastered on walls and on billboards. 

I have seen photographs transformed into three-dimensional sculptures. 

I have seen photographs projected onto the body. 

I have seen photographs appropriated, mixed, remixed, and streamed over the web.

I  have seen photographs that interrogate our conception of reality.

I have seen photographs that explore questions of race and gender identities. 

I have seen photographs of virtual worlds. 

I have seen photographs of dreams.

I have seen photographs of augmented reality and environments that only science fiction authors can imagine. 

I have seen photographs that educate us about the world, ecology, pollution and climate change. 

I have seen photographs that show us the horrors of failed states, dislocation, immigration and global refugees. 

I have seen photographs of archeological expeditions. 

I have seen historical photographs, found photographs, and images found in the silt of digital waste dumps stored on dead websites, hard drives and abandoned media and machines. 

I have seen photographs that unveil the deep state, governmental surveillance and the loss of our personal privacy to the profit-making machines fed by surveillance capitalism. 

I have seen digital interventions in the production and printing process that yield images never before seen. 

I have seen interventions in the physical world.

I have seen an explosion of platforms in which photographs are displayed: galleries, festivals, projections, walls, popups, collectives, guerrilla postings in museums, and photographs displayed, mixed, remixed, sampled and distributed on websites around the world.  

And I have seen traditional photographs of portraiture, nature, still life, the street and architecture.

In Camera Lucida Barthes’ ontological quest was to discover the essential nature of the photograph, its eidos or Form, the characteristic that distinguishes it from all other kinds of images. He found that photography’s defining characteristic is the necessity of a referent and that it provides documentary evidence that the thing indeed existed. Barthes writes: “I can never deny that the thing has been there.” This is as an obvious point: there must be a thing to photograph before the camera can capture an image of the thing. Without a referent there can be no photograph; paintings and drawings, on the other hand, do not need a referent; they can be imagined and made directly by the artist. No painting could convince Barthes that its referent had actually existed. 

The high evolutionary velocity of photography driven by artistic, technological and cultural advancements coupled with an increasingly complex and fragmented society forces us to question whether it is even possible for photography to have an essence, an eidos, a Form. Is this the right question to ask?

Since Niepce made the first photograph of his garden in Burgundy in 1827, we have been making images that reflect the endless possibilities of the human experience. Today more than five billion people own cell phones with digital cameras; everyone has become a photographer. It has been estimated that over 1.4 trillion photographs will be taken in 2020. There are photographs created by futuristic technology that we can scarcely imagine. There are images taken by electron microscopes that have a resolution of half the width of a hydrogen atom. The Event Horizon Telescope is a global array of telescopes that captured an image of a black hole. The T-Cup camera in a single exposure processes 10 trillion frames per second. It is so fast that it can track the movement of light beams frame by frame. There are countless vernacular images being uploaded every day of babies and families, cats and dogs, vacations and sunsets, ads and selfies. Photography captures every aspect of the human experience. 

Is it conceivable that all of these photographs, from the selfie to the single frame representing light’s movement, is manifested by a single Form or essence that is inherent in all photographs? And does this essential quality distinguish the photograph from all other forms of visual representation? Is this the unanswered question or is it the wrong question to ask?

Naked Desire: Eros, Pornography and Photography 

And yet, and yet… 

David Allen Harvey’s photography book, Based on a True Story, has been lying on my desk for the last couple of months under a pile of old drafts of this book. On the cover is a photograph of a beautiful young girl standing on a beach in Rio de Janeiro. She has long black hair, slightly wet and sea salted, falling over the top of her bikini.  In one hand she holds a popsicle, in the other she holds a yellow beach ball. The lenses of her pink plastic sunglasses reflect sand, sea, umbrellas and bodies lying on the beach. It is an image of heat and sun, sand and sweat, sea and salt, and dripping popsicles. She is living here and now, on the beach, perfectly present. She is his muse. She is his desire. She is the Siren, singing her songs of desire, sex and death.

There is no single detail in this photograph that is the punctum; the entire image pierces me with desire. The stimulation of consuming desire makes this a powerful and compelling photograph.  Is eros the eidos of photography?

Barthes distinguishes between pornography and eros. Pornography presents the sexual organs as  “a motionless object.”  It may be mildly stimulating at first but it then becomes boring; it does not contain a punctum, it does not pierce us. Pornography is studium. The erotic photograph, on the other hand, may not even show the sexual organs; they are not the point of the photograph, it takes us to a place of desire beyond what the photograph permits us to see. The erotic photograph shows us “being, body and soul together.” It may stimulate a fantasy. It may show us something luminous and light and subtle which has a different quality than the heavy, dark and obvious quality of pornography. To take an erotic photograph the photography must take the image at the right moment to capture the “kairos of desire”. 

The use of the ancient Greek word “kairos” is interesting. Kairos means the right or the critical moment for action. It is the precise moment when the photographer must release the shutter to capture the erotic image. This suggests Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive moment. Here is his definition of the decisive moment in the introduction to his classic work The Decisive Moment:

Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.

To stimulate erotic desire, the photographer must capture the subject at the precise moment when the body of the subject is positioned so that it is offered with “abandonment” and with “benevolence”. 

The primal root of kairos is associated with archery. It is the exact moment when the arrow is released to penetrate its target. 

B. TRUTH AND LIES 

Introduction

Barthes writes in Camera Lucida that the eidos of photography is  “that has been.”   

A photograph attests that the thing we see in the photograph had indeed been there. It is a certificate that the thing was real and it existed in front of the camera. The photograph documents the truth of the image. Andre Bazin agreed with this view: 

In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.

Andre Bazin, The Ontology of the Image

Photographs lie; it is intrinsic to their form. Photographs lie more than they tell the truth. Marshall McLuhan wrote that no only does photography lie, it practices multiple deceits because it substitute a “reel” or illusory world for reality. 

To say that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an ‘allnights newsery reel’, that substitutes a ‘reel’ world for reality.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

How do we know that the photograph does not create a false narrative by framing and cropping? How do we know that the photographer did not create an artificial scene which was photographed to produce a manufactured reality? How do we know that the photograph was not manipulated in Photoshop? How do we know that the referent never existed at all because it was created entirely in the digital domain from the imagination of the artist? 

Does an image of a cloud or of water flowing in a stream prove that these phenomena exist when we consider that their essence is movement, flow and change, and that new clouds and ripples arise from moment to moment? To take a photograph of these things which stops their movement is deny their essence, to turn their truth into a lie.

The Homeless Camp Beneath the Manhattan Bridge

Yesterday, walking beneath the Manhattan Bridge, I noticed a homeless camp. It was strange that I had not seen it before because I walk beneath the bridge every day. There were tents, torn mattresses, broken shopping carts lying on their sides, wood crates with dirty dishes, empty beer bottles, abandoned chairs, old clothes and garbage strewn about. I was intrigued. I photographed the camp.  How could a homeless camp arise overnight? Had  I somehow not noticed it before?  I went back the next day to take more pictures. I saw a film crew cleaning up the camp. I had seen a set that had been created to make a movie. Before I saw the film crew, my photographs documented that a homeless camp had arisen beneath the Manhattan Bridge. My photographs were evidence that the camp was real, “that it had been.”  After I saw the film crew, I realized that I had photographed a film set. 

Are my photographs of the homeless camp evidence that it existed as Barthes insists in Camera Lucida? Are they a certificate of presence and of truth? It is true that they documented a homeless camp. But they documented a lie. The camp was an illusion created by a film studio to make a movie, another illusion, that will be seen in the future. The homeless did not build the camp: they did not live, cook and sleep there.  It lasted for one night and then it was taken down. The camp will be seen in the film when it is released in the future. The film will create an illusion that the camp existed beneath the bridge within the context of the film’s characters, plot and story. Both the film and the photographs of the camp are an illusion.

Barthes said that photography can lie as to the meaning of a thing but never to its existence. My photographs lied about the meaning of the homeless camp: the objects within the camp existed in fact but they were a film set rather than a homeless camp. They lied as to the meaning of the objects. They lie about both meaning and existence; the truth and the lies are intertwined.  Can we separate the strands of truth and lies? Does the lie that a homeless camp existed beneath the bridge subvert the truth that the objects of the camp existed beneath the bridge (even though they were film props on a film set which only replicated reality)? It is meaningless to say that the photograph documents the reality of the existence of the thing without considering what the thing means. If the thing is based on a lie then it may not even exist because we do not know what it is. 

Barthes said that a photograph’s power of authentication exceeds its power of representation. How do we authenticate something that is a simulation? The homeless camp existed for one day, it will never be seen again. It was a simulation of a homeless camp built by a film crew to be filmed and included within another simulation of reality: a movie. My photographs of the homeless camp authenticated nothing but the reality of a film set constructed to create an illusion. It is more accurate to say that the power of representation exceeds its power of authentication. 

Robert Capa

Robert Capa took an iconic photograph of the precise instant when a soldier was shot during the Spanish Civil War. However, careful research has shown that the photograph may have been staged. The hills in the background of the photograph suggest that it was taken thirty-five miles away from where the battle occurred and the soldier was allegedly shot. The photograph does not prove that the soldier was shot during the Spanish Civil War.  All we have is evidence that the soldier lived; we do not know if he was in the war, if he saw action or if he was shot in battle. We can see what the photograph represents but we cannot know if it is true. It is not a certificate of the truth of what it purports to show. 

Photographer create images by exclusion, inclusion, framing, cropping, context, editing, processing and post-production. Film prints may be cropped, dodged, burned and manipulated with paper, chemicals and enlargers.  Digital images may be manipulated, transformed, processed, modified, corrupted, deleted and remixed with other images.

We cannot accept that a photograph establishes its referent is real without additional evidence that supports the truth of what the photograph is purporting to show. 

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson constructs elaborate movie sets that suggest mysterious narratives of alienation, loss and anxiety. The sets often require months of location hunting, casting, and storyboarding, and a crew to manage the actors, lighting, props and special effects.  They straddle the line between photography and cinema. The photographs could be frames sliced out of a movie that we will never see. They are so highly resolved and technically perfect that, even though we can see they are staged, they evoke powerful emotions. The actors are silent, frozen in time and space, often contemplating impossible scenes; I  read the scenes as psychological landscapes. We know that the movie sets exist, their hyperreal quality makes them appear even more real than life, but we also know that their narrative is unreal, it is an illusion that does not really exist. Crewdson’s photographs create a tension between truth and lie, reality and illusion, meaning and mystery, nature and artifice.

The movie sets are evidence that something “has been there” but they do not attest to the truth of the thing.  Contrary to Barthes’ view, the existence of the thing does not necessarily establish its truth. It is not compelling evidence. The thing exists but it is a manufactured, artificial and manipulated reality that undercuts its truth and exists as a lie and an illusion. 

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski has challenged the notion that a photograph establishes the truth and authenticity of a referent because it was indeed “there”.  In his first book, Boltanski used a photograph to “prove” that he was at the beach as a child with his parents.  However, the photograph did not authenticate that it was indeed Boltanski at the beach; the meaning of the photograph was ambiguous. He “proved” that he was at the beach by the photograph’s caption and some documentation. However, the caption and documentation were fake. The truth is that he was indeed at the beach with his parents as a child.  Boltanski used a false photograph and fake documentation to authenticate a true event. He writes:

In most of my photographic pieces I have used this property of the truth one accords to photography to expose it or to try to show that photography lies, that it doesn’t speak the truth but rather the cultural code. 

Boltanski’s Detective installation consisted of 400 black and white portraits from the French weekly newspaper Detective which reported sensational crimes, trials and victim stories. The portraits were displayed as a large scale montage but there was no explanatory text to establish which  photographs were of criminals and which were of victims. Spectators of the installation knew that the photographs are images of individuals involved in crimes, but they could not distinguish between criminals and victims. The images were isolated from their context. Boltanski saw the people as actors in a play: some were victims and others were murders. The spectators were forced to speculate as to the role of the person in the photograph; there was no way to establish the truth.

The net result of this installation was twofold: First, the moral agenda of spectators has collapsed because the distinction between victim and victim has been removed. Second, the corollary is that that very distinction was a simplistic and even false one in the first place, as categorizing individuals in terms of murderers versus victims or good versus evil is a gratuitous polarization. All individuals have the capacity for compassion or violence, and it is only in retrospect that w e classify them by their actions.These photographs are essentially arbitrary in meaning in that they belong to events or circumstances beyond our experience and they do not bear intrinsic or universal significance.

Richard Hobbs, Boltanski’s Visual Archives

What facts do these photographs authenticate? What do they tell us?  We know that the people existed because the referent must exist for the photograph to exist but who are they and what happened to them?  Since the images are taken out of context, we do not know what they represent. Personal bias, prejudice and social codes determine whether each spectator thinks the photograph shows a criminal or a victim.

Do these photographs mean anything at all beyond simply establishing that the people in the images existed and that their photographs were taken? Barthes was overwhelmed by the truth of the image and concluded that the essence of photography is that the “thing has been there” or “that has been”.  But these images do not establish truth; they create ambiguity and uncertainty. 

If we ignore the context of a photograph, then it has no meaning at all, an ambiguous meaning or it establishes a falsehood.  Meaning drains from images by ignoring their context. Perhaps Barthes was right for photographs taken of a still life but he was wrong for the universe of photographs were information outside of the four corners of the photograph is necessary to establish its meaning and truthfulness. 

Truth, lies, ambiguity.

Araki

Araki takes photographs of the future by changing the time-stamp dates on his photographs. He simultaneously manipulates time and shows that photography is fake. Araki describes his process as follows:

During the 1980s, everyone was taking pictures like a diary. In that cultural climate, the first cameras with a date function were introduced to the public. Such a camera allowed you to date all your photographs. It could be manipulated so easily. I took photographs, one after another, with different dates since I could switch the past with the future by manipulating the dates on an automatic camera. Photography is lying, and I am a liar by nature. Anything in front of you, except a real object, is fake. Photographers might consider how to express their love through photography, but those photographs are “fake love.” That is how I make the future and past. 

Nobuyoshi Araki

Araki knows that photographs lie but he is honest about its deceptions.

Araki refutes Barthes main thesis in Camera Lucida that the photograph provides evidence of “what has been” as its unique and essential quality. Araki photographs the future rather than documenting the past. His photographs establish “what will be” rather than “what has been”. Furthermore, since his photographs are forward looking, they point to life rather than to death. He has broken the connection between photography and death and, as a photographer, is not an agent of death. 

Wolfgang Tillmans

That is a challenge I’ve always taken. I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience. With these abstract pictures, although the eye recognizes them as photographic rather than painted, the eye also tries to connect them to reality. There’s always this association machine working in the brain, and that is why it is important to me that they are actually photographic and not painted.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Interview Magazine

Tillmans is a complex and challenging artist with a wide variety of strategies and images. His abstract images are made without a camera by using photosensitive paper, colored ink and darkroom manipulations. Sometimes he uses chance by running the printing press without plates or by pouring ink into the wrong compartments to create accidents, random effects and overprinted pages. Some images are swatches of color that suggest elements of the body such as hair, cells or skin. These images exist between control and chance, abstract and representation, the tangible and intangible. 

The photographs (as images fixed on paper) are the objects; they are the thing; they are not images of referents that exist outside of the photographs. We do not recognize referents that exist in the present or the past. They do not provide evidence of “that has been” nor do they trigger associations with death, time and memory. Tillmans explains: 

For me, the abstract picture is already objective because it’s a concrete object and represents itself,” Tillmans says; “the paper on which the picture is printed is for me an object, there is no separating the picture from that which carries it. That’s why I like to show photographs sometimes framed and sometimes not, just taped to the wall.” 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Abstract Pictures

Thoughts on Digital Images From Delhi, India

Consider the transformations that must occur for a digital camera to capture a scene, create a digital image and display that image on a screen so that we may perceive the image in our consciousness. 

Light rays from the sun take almost eight minutes to travel from the sun to the scene where the photons then reflect the scene and activate the pixels on the sensor. The sensor is made up of millions of cavities called photosites which open when the shutter opens and close when the exposure is complete. The photosites interpret the photons as electrical signals that vary in strength based on how many photons were actually captured in the cavity.  If we look at a picture that was taken with just that electrical data from the sensor, the images would be in gray-scale. A “Bayer filter array” creates color by placing a colored filter over the top of each photosite which is then used to determine the color of an image based on how the electrical signals from neighboring photosites measure. The colors of the filters are red, green and blue, with a ratio of one red, one blue and two green in every section of four photosites.

Digital images are made of binary machine language which is a low-level language comprised of lines of zeros and ones.  Every function used by a digital camera to create an image is represented in this language. Each time a photograph is taken the central processing unit in the camera makes millions of calculations instantaneously to capture, process, store and display the image. The sensor and the central processing unit in the camera create a digital image that we can see in the camera’s viewfinder, upload to a computer or print to paper.

The camera’s shutter opens for a fraction of a second, its sensor captures the image of a scene and then the scene is gone. The sensor captures only an instant of duration. The sensor abstracts an instant of time’s flow into a still image. It transforms light into electricity. We see the scene only in the past; there is always elapsed time from the bounce of the light from the surface of the referent to the sensor, the processing time for the camera to create the image, the time for the image in the camera’s display to reach our eye’s retina and the neural processing time needed for us to perceive the image in our consciousness. The image is stored in the memory of the camera and uploaded to a computer where it is processed and stored as a digital file. 

The image may be uploaded to a network which is connected to the cloud. Cloud computing is a type of Internet-based computing, where servers, storage and applications are delivered to computers over the Internet. In the cloud images may be stored, copied, modified, transformed and remixed with other images. They may be repurposed, re-contextualized and transmuted. They may be shared, modified and remixed instantly and globally. 

The observer downloads the images from the cloud to a computer or device which displays the image on its screen. Light from the screen stimulates the retina of observer’s eye which causes  a cascade of chemical and electrical events that trigger nerve impulses. These are sent to various visual centers of the brain through the fibers of the optic nerve. The optical nerve transmits the impulses to the observer’s  brain where it constructs the image from the neural impulses. 

All of this is created by the magic of software. Software is a code which runs all computers, devices, digital cameras and the Internet. Digital images are the output of the code. The code may become infected with a virus or malware; it may produce unpredictable results. Distortions may occur in the software stack from machine language, to assembly programs, and to higher level programs that are executed by software engineers. The code may induce a glitch into the image or the image may even become corrupted and unreadable. 

I write these words early in the morning in Delhi, India. A sulfurous sun begins to rise through the reddish brown haze, the trees begin to stir in the heatwaves, the traffic builds, the auto-rickshaw drivers begin circling for their prey.  I am recovering from retinal surgery.  My retina detached in the remote territory of Mustang in Nepal, close to the Tibetan border. My perception of the world became dim and blurry, as if I was looking through a brown paper bag; there was no resolution, no detail, little recognition of familiar forms. After the surgery, I could see lights and shapes but lines would curve and undulate, some colors were dense and rich, others were pale. The resolution of shapes fluctuated with the many rounds of eyedrops that I took throughout the day. 

Since my retina did not give my consciousness a consistent and accurate input of the visual impulses received by my eye that reflected the “real” world, how could I assess whether the image of the world that I perceived in my mind was true? How could I know if the wall separating my hotel from the street was really white or brown? How could I know if the telephone lines were straight or curved? How could I know that my perception of colors was true? I could not authenticate my perception of the world; it was created by a broken optical mechanism. Since I could not determine what the world “really” looked like, how could I determine if a photograph of the world was authentic? 

There is a chain of actions by the photographer and digital operations by the camera that create a digital image. Each link in the chain induces distortion into the authentication of the image. The photographer (exclusion, inclusion and manipulation), the camera (the lens, the resolution of the sensor and distortion of in-camera processing), the post production process of the image (cropping, conversion, filtering, Photoshop), software (corruption, the algorithm, the glitch), the observer (retina, memory, interpretation), all insert distortion, inaccuracy, bias and subjectivity into the image.  How can this process establish evidence of the truth of the existence of the thing?

The photograph is an artificial construction of the reflection of an image of a scene abstracted from time and space.  

Authentication of Photographs 

The camera does not create an image that proves the existence of the referent. The photographer creates an image by framing a scene; the photographer selects what is inside the frame and what is outside; the photographer controls the context of the photograph which controls its meaning. The photographer creates images that reflect his own subjective reality rather than an objective reality.  The photographer creates the “that.”

 Digital images undergo many transformations from camera sensor to display. The photographer processes the raw digital image with software programs that may transform the image by either subtly cropping or balancing or inserting new elements to create an image of a scene that does not exist in reality. There are more transformations from display to the observer’s perception. The perceptions, biases and culture of the observer may distort the image further. Subjectivity corrupts truth. Each stage of the process from capture to observation corrupts truth. 

Barthes introduces the notion that photographs certify truth; he borrows legal concepts to conclude that photographs are evidence of truth. In the legal system, there is a process by which we can establish the truth of fact that are the basis of a court’s decision. There are rules of evidence that courts follow to establish truth.  Extrinsic evidence is the only way to establish the truth of what a photograph purports to represent; truth is not established by the four corners of the photograph. The Federal Rules of Evidence state:

To satisfy the requirement of authenticating or identifying an item of evidence, the proponent must produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is. This may be established by the testimony of a witness with knowledge that the document is what it claims to be. The appearance, contents, substance, internal patterns, or other distinctive characteristics of the item, taken together with all the circumstances are also relevant in authenticating the document.

Commentary to Rule 901 of the Federal Rules of Evidence

This means that extraneous evidence is necessary to prove the authenticity of the image. The goal of the legal system is to establish fact. From fact we see truth. 

Extrinsic evidence eliminates the lie, the manipulation, the subjectivity and the distortion inherent within the photographic process that spans the capture of an image to its observation. The observer cannot know the truth of the image without external evidence to prove what was actually seen. 

When I am the photographer I can testify that I took the photograph, I did not manipulate the photograph, that it is true. The rules of evidence will determine whether my testimony is true or whether I am lying. Only when a photograph has been authenticated by the photographer may it be used as evidence of the truth of “that has been.”

The essence of photography is “maybe that was there.” The image object that I hold in my hand (the print) exists: I see it and I hold it.  The fact of its existence is true. It shows me that the referent may have existed in the past. Or it may not. It does not tell me what the referent means or that the image of the referent is true. 

Photographs lie. Photographers lie. Observers lie.

The Silentium Does Not Lie

There is only one class of photograph that does not lie: the silentium. These photographs do not purport to authentic “reality” or show “that has been”; their purpose is not to accurately reproduce a scene. They may be abstract images or images of something that is evanescent or two-dimensional, such as a cloud or the tonal gradations of sea and sky. They referent may not even exist in the “real world” (consider Wolfgang Tillman’s abstract photographs)  or only exist in the briefest of moments, never to be seen again. These photographs do not represent; they exist as objects in and of themselves. Their purpose is not to stimulate death, time or memory; their purpose is to create an alternative reality; one detached from the banality of the real and centered in the mystery. 

They are true. 

The Death of the Photographer

In his book S/Z, Barthes distinguishes between a “readerly” and a “writerly” text. A readerly text is one in which the reader is a passive consumer; the reader does not participate in the construction of its meaning.  The text only has one clear and unambiguous meaning; it is usually a linear narrative.  Barthes describes the plight of the reader of a readerly text:

Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness-he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum. 

Roland Barthes, S/Z 

A writerly text on the other hand is one in which the reader and the author are like co-producers of the text. The writer and the reader co-create the work and its meaning.  

The writerly text is ourselves in the act of writing, before the infinite game of the world (the world as game) can be traversed, cut, arrested, frozen by one single system such as an ideology, a genre or one type of criticism) 

Roland Barthes, S/Z 

Finnegans Wake is the greatest example of a writerly work that we have in the Western cannon.  The language is exceedingly complex and dense, it is filled with obscure references, multi-leveled puns, deconstructed and recombined words and is written in over 70 languages. It is a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma. Since its publication in 1939 there has been an industry of academic commentators who have struggled to interpret Finnegans Wake but there has not been and never will be a definitive interpretation of its meaning. The work cannot be read without the active participation of the reader to derive the meaning of the words by studying commentaries and Joycean dictionaries; otherwise the text would be nothing but gibberish. Jacques Derrida observes: “How many languages can be lodged in two words by Joyce, lodged or inscribed, kept or burned, celebrated or violated?” Derrida writes:

The other great paradigm would be the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. He repeats and mobilizes and babelizes the (asymptotic) totality of the equivocal, he makes this his theme and his operation, he tries to make outcrop, with the greatest possible synchrony, at great speed, the greatest power of the meanings buried in each syllabic fragment, subjecting each atom of writing to fission in order to overload the unconscious with the whole memory of man: mythologies, religion, philosophies, sciences, psychoanalysis, literatures.

In his article Barthes’ Irreversible Codes: An Intertextual Reading of James Joyce’s “Araby”  Professor Seyed Ali Booryazadeh analyzes a short story from Dubliners using Barthes’ system of structural analysis which he used in S/Z. He writes:

Joyce, the lord of words and disguise, created an enigmatic texture for the readers to interpret. The readers’ plight when encountered with gnomonic structures resuscitates the experiences of the characters that themselves are entangled with interpretive questions in the story. Although an interpretation, no matter how conclusive and practically dependable, remains always a generation disparate from that to which it is addressed, it helps to have a better understanding and outlook of the text. Intertextuality as an interpretive and semiotic appliance verifies that each text exist in relation to others. 

In empowering and challenging the readers of literature to create meaning, Barthes turns readers into writers. Readers become co-authors of the text. Barthes questions the singularity, uniqueness and originality of the text. Barthes severs authority and authorship; he refers to the author of a text as an orchestrator of an “already written” text rather than its originator. The language of a text precedes the author. The author remixes writings in much the same way that a modern electronic musician samples and remixes pre-existing music to make a new composition. To emancipate the reader, Barthes kills  the author. In Image-Music-Text Barthes writes:

A text is . . . a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations . . . The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.

Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text 

The author is dead; the photographer is dead. As a photographer, I create  photographs but I do not create their  meaning. That is not for me; it is the work of the observer. If I am the observer, I create my own meaning from the photograph; not the photographer. I decide if the photograph is true or false, real or hallucinatory, evidence of presence or absence. The photograph stimulates my memories and my optical and virtual images; it gives me the key to decode its many meanings. The photograph is only an element in a complex mix of memory and image that is specific to the subjective consciousness of the observer. Its meaning is unstable and variable.  It may have as many meanings as observers.

I create the photograph. I give it meaning. Does the image wound me? Does it trigger my emotions? Does it leave me indifferent, bored, unmoved?  Does it still my mind and open me to satori? Does the image move me by its aesthetic quality: its composition, texture, movement, space, light, rhythm, color or scale? Does the image stimulate my mind to create circuits of feedback loops of memories and images?

 Let us consider two types of photographs: the readerly and the writerly. 

The readerly photograph is closed and obvious. It has only one meaning. It is unambiguous. It merely shows us something such as a cat. The observer does not participate in the construction of the meaning of the image because it has no meaning. It is a mere record of a thing. It inspires no emotions. stimulates no memories, suggests no questions. It does not provoke, it does not wound. 

The writerly photograph provokes, stimulates, challenges. It may be ambiguous or mysterious. We must actively participate in constructing its meaning. It may be a Tillmans abstract image, a Fukase raven or a Crewdson construction. We are not passive consumers of the image. It is a catalyst for circuits that spin new images in the mind’s eye. It may wound emotionally. It may create a state of bliss, eroticism or excitement. It may surprise. It may trigger memories and emotions. It may be dangerous.

In the Pleasure of Text, Barthes writes:

Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

I want my photographs to be writerly. I want my photographs to be images of bliss. I want to provoke, to confront, to challenge, to wound the observer. I want the observer to participate and to co-create the meaning of the image with me. Of what use is a photograph if it does not? Otherwise, we are photographing banalities such as cats, flowers and sunsets. 

C. BARTHES,  JOYCE, THE MOTHER AND THE SEA

A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Deleuze and Guattari use the figure of the orchid and the wasp to illustrate the principle of the rhizome. Certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to attract male wasps into a trans-species courtship dance. As these wasps move from flower to flower, desperately trying to mate with them, so too does the pollen which has been transferred from the orchid to their body of the wasp. Through this process the wasps are co-opted into the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call a becoming: the wasp becomes the orchid and the orchid becomes the wasp.

The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp…What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.  The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Rhizomatic connections are horizontal, vertical, non-linear connections. They are semiotic chains of associations. They exist on a continuum, they are continuous analogue wave forms rather than binary digital codes. They are based on the principle of interbeing. Thich Nhat Hanh explains:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. 

Rhizomes even extend to cities. Deleuze describes Amsterdam as a rhizomic city:

We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine. 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

The sun, the moon, the sea, a wave, a boat, a wasp, an orchid. The son, the mother, the writer, the text, the alienation, the guilt, the fear.  Barthes, Buddhism, Joyce, Amsterdam, Dedalus, Sisyphus, Proteus, the labyrinth, the Song of the Sirens, the boats, the sea, silence, cunning and exile, death time and memory, form and emptiness,

And…and…and…

Dedalus, the labyrinth of multiplicity and text, Ariadne’s thread, dreams, fear and guilt, loss and love, luminosity and the green sea, wax, rosewood and ashes, the death of the mother, the three masted spar of the ghost ship, silent and adrift, the Song of the Sirens, the gold and the bronze, presence and absence, sex and death, diaphane and adiaphane, translucent and opaque, light and dark, the bull and the bullockbefriending bard, the neutral, the interbeing, intermezzo, intertexuality, the fluctuating space between the golden thread, the fragment and non-linearity, the text, a multi-dimensional space, a tissue of signs, a web of signifiers, Finnegans Wake, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,the  infinite expanse within a finite structure, ambiguity and enigma, literary alchemy, the shadow and ghosts, subversions and chiaroscuro, the bliss of the text, traces, riddles and enigmas, portmanteau, neologisms, dream language, and instabilities, shifts, deconstruction and logodaedalus, Derrida’s resistance and disruption, outwit and outplay, neither ordered nor chaotic, neither formal nor informal, neither structured nor fluid, neither centre nor periphery, Ulysses, silence, cunning and exile, texts and waves, the overcrossing of fluid meanings, the liquidity of ideas, a coming and going, recirculation, all united by the sea mother and death…  

And…and…and…

The deathless Egyptian Proteus, who knew the depths of every sea. 

Odyssey, IV, 385-386

Proteus, the Greek god of the oceans and the rivers: the primal waters, flowing and yet still, containing all form and yet without form. Proteus the shape shifter, the alchemical skin walker, constantly flowing and changing. Feminine waters: sexuality, procreation and motherhood. Water of life. Moon light reflecting.  The valley spirit of the world. The vastness of the unconsciousness. The Sirens calling the sailers from the sea to their death. The language of Barthes is protean; meaning shifts, it is unstable, ambiguous, floating; meaning lies in the spaces between the words, like the silence between the notes. Ambiguity opens new meanings and conceptual relationships. The words never fix a single meaning. They counter, subvert, support and extend meaning. There is the twist and the surprise; unexpected associations and meanings, thought to decipher. He does not yield his secrets easily, he evades by shape shifting, like his cigarette smoke swirling and rising in the cafe.  He explores the accordion spaces between the polarities; he subverts the paradigm of our oppositional thought, he frustrates the conventional wisdom, he banishes the banal, he writes the ode and its palinode. He writes of The Neutral, that which outplays the binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western discourse: male and female, good and evil, matter and spirit. What meaning can we find on both sides of the binaries, in between the meanings, and in neither and in both? The shamanic shape shifter never rests. 

And…and…and…

Boats: mother: death, guilt and fear.

Boats: mother: life, love and luminosity.

Boats: father: death: loss: mother.

Boats: father: death: time: memory.

Boats: water, moon, journey, transformation.

Diaphane, adiaphane.

Translucent, opaque.

Presence, absence.

Positive, negative. 

Light, dark.

Camera lucida, camera obscura.

Water, bitter death, lost. 

Salt green, mother, death.

Sea green eyes.

Salt green, father, death.

Dead boats. 

Sunken boats.

Dead mothers. 

Dead fathers. 

The sea, the sea. 

And…and…and…

The Mother and the Sea; The Transformation of the Son Into the Mother: Barthes’ Family History

Thalatta! Thalatta! The sea! The sea! The joyous sea!

James Joyce, Ulysses

The sea, the primordial mother goddess, the womb of the world, gives birth from the mysteries of her unfathomable depths, creates and nourishes all life and yet, the violence of her storms, the steep falling mountains of water, heavy winds blowing the spume from the tops of mountain waves in the night, white slashes in the darkness, the boats staining, shrieking and breaking, the shoals and the deeps, the rocks and seashores wearily eroding over eons of time from the ceaseless pounding, the boat bones lie in graves on her lee shores. We are embraced by the mother and we drown in her waters.

The sea is beginning and end. The sea is stillness and movement. The sea is surface and depth. The sea is the plane stretching to the horizon line. The sea is the fall of the wave from the trough to the curl, the unfurling, floating, flowing water. 

Barthes’ mother, Henriette Binger, was born in 1893. Her father, Louis-Gustave Binger, was a naval officer and explorer who spent much of his life in Africa. Henriette met Louis Barthes, who was an officer in the Merchant Navy,  on a boat sailing in Canada, and they married when she was twenty. Barthes was born in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy.  Cherbourg is a military, fishing and yachting port surrounded by the sea. His father’s boat was sunk in 1916 by the Germans while patrolling the North Sea. 

Barthes lost his father before he reached the age of one and his mother became a war widow at twenty-three. Barthes grew up in Bayonne which is a port on the southwest coast of France.  Barthes lived by the sea and it was a source of inspiration:

In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, signboards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Coming home in the evening, a frequent detour along the Adour, the Allé es marines: tall trees, abandoned boats, unspecified strollers, boredom’s drift: here  floated the sexuality of public gardens, of public gardens, of parks.

Roland Barthes, Barthes by Barthes

The sea flowed through Barthes’ life. His grandfather was a naval officer, his parents met on the sea, the sea took his father, he grew up by the sea. The sea air and the water wave, the light and the sound permeated his life. 

Barthes lived with his mother his entire life; he adored his mother, she sustained his life. The mother and the sea are one:

The homophony in French between ‘la mer’ (sea) and ‘la mère’ (mother) makes this monosyllable the term of connection and separation at the same time. Barthes would find it impossible to break the first, primitive attachment every child has with its mother, and the reason for this lies in the depths of the sea.

Samoyault, Tiphaine, Barthes: A Biography 

Barthes took care of his mother before she died. His loss was a devastating blow.  It forced him to confront the loss of the most important person in his life and the loss of abiding and unshakeable love and home. He was forced to confront the reality of his own death. He became unmoored and adrift, depressed and listless, mourning. 

Sea death. 

Salt green, mother, death.

Sea green eyes.

Salt green, father, death.

Dead boats. 

Dead mothers. 

Dead fathers. 

Sea death.

The day after she died he begins his Mourning Diary. He writes of suffering and his daily struggles to survive. He questions whether life can have any meaning and contemplates his own death. It is the metamorphosis caused by a sea change. 

Overcrowded gathering. Inevitable, increasing futility. I think of her, in the next room. Everything collapses. It is, here, the formal beginning of the big, long bereavement. For the first time in two days, the acceptable notion of my own death.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary 

The death of Barthes’ mother resurrected memories of his father’s death at sea. In his Mourning Diary he mentions Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The passage is addressed to Ferdinand, who had just been shipwrecked with his father, who drowns. 

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange. 

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Act I, Scene 2) 

Barthes writes of his father:

The father, dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial discourse. By maternal intermediary his memory—never an oppressive one— merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty…

Roland Barthes, Barthes by Barthes

Barthes cares for his mother during her illness. Their roles became reversed; Barthes became the mother and the mother became the daughter. Barthes describes this in Camera Lucida:

During her illness, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 

Ultimately I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child. Which was my way of resolving Death. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

When his mother died it was as if he had lost both his mother and his daughter. 

For months, I have been her mother. It is as if I had lost my daughter (a greater grief than that? It had never occurred to me.)

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary 

This explains his intense emotional reaction when he discovers the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother as a young girl. There is nothing more painful than the loss of a child by its mother.  The mother looking at photographs of her lost child can only bring suffering.

After the death of his mother, Barthes saw no reason to live, no reason to “attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force.”  Life had become nothing but “a bitter froth on the surface of a deep sea.” He could not write, he could only suffer, mourn and await his death. 

The high seas of suffering—leave the shores, nothing in sight. Writing is no longer possible.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary 

Boats: Barthes by Barthes

In the Introduction to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes writes that he is including images within his book as a reward for finishing it. He includes images of his youth that fascinate or enthrall him but he does not know why he selects certain images; it is a mystery. The first image is “a demand for love.” It shows a boy in the arms of a woman; perhaps Barthes in the arms of his mother?  Images of his father, a town, houses, gardens, grandparents, childhood photos, friends, students, medical records, documents; images of Barthes as a child and as a man.  

Barthes walks through the town, along the great avenues by the sea. He sees the abandoned boats and tall trees like masts of ships, the public gardens, places for sexual experience in the leafy shadows. In reading of his childhood, we feel his loneliness and solitude. There is no mention of friends, of play, of the normal events of childhood: birthday parties, holidays, family dinners, vacations. He had no father and, except for his mother, all of the women in his life seemed distant, removed, lifeless.  He does not describe his lovers or his sexual experiments. Despair, boredom, loneliness and isolation. The vague face reflected in store windows. The abandoned boat, leaking and sinking slowly into the darkness, falling waters. He is listless. He cannot express the darkness, desires and frustrations in his heart. 

Barthes remembers the gardens of his childhood home. There were three gardens and to cross the boundaries between the gardens was a “significant action”.  The first garden symbolized the world. It was closest to the sanctuary of the house. The second garden was the domestic garden. It was a garden of paths, flowers, herbs and trees, and old ladies complacently knitting. The third garden was undefined, mysterious and perhaps dangerous. It was a burial ground for extra litters of kittens and, in the dark hollows of trees, the place for sexual encounters. The garden of thanatos and eros, death and sex. 

To escape his isolation and feelings of loneliness, Barthes turns from the gardens to the novels of Jules Verne:

The worldly, the domestic, the wild: is this not the very tripartition of social desire? It is anything but surprising that I turn from this Bayonnaise garden to the fictive, Utopian spaces of Jules Verne and Fourier…
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 

In his article Nautilus and the Drunken Boat, Barthes observes that Verne was not sailing on a heroic quest for adventure and wisdom but rather, was living on a ship to shrink and contain the world, to reduce it to an enclosed space, to contain the mystery of existence, to exist in comfort and security.  Verne’s ships are symbols of closure and containment: houses, huts, holes, caves. The mother’s womb, the hollows of trees. Barthes conceives of the boat as a symbol of a finite enclosure rather than a vehicle of transportation:

Quite the contrary: the ship may well be a symbol for departure; it is, at a deeper level, the emblem of closure. An inclination for ships always means the joy of perfectly enclosing oneself, of having at hand the greatest possible number of objects, and having at one’s disposal an absolutely finite space. To like ships is first and foremost to like a house, a superlative one since it is unremittingly closed, and not at all vague sailings into the unknown: a ship is a habitat before being a means of transport. 

Roland Barthes, Mythologies-The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat

We depart from the safety of the harbor to explore the unknown, to be self sufficient, to test ourselves when disaster strikes during the sea storm. The boat provides us with everything we need to survive at sea but its security is illusory. Waves and winds, reefs and rocks can sink the boat. We may be forced to abandon the boat, to be cast into the fearsome and dangerous sea, adrift, lost, no longer secure in the illusory safety of our boat. Now, the boat has no helmsman. The boat is no longer a symbol of a contained and safe place; the boat travels on its own: 

In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcize the possessive nature of the man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship then is no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a traveling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies-The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat 

We may fear perishing in our life raft, in the cold, the waves, the hunger, the fear, the loss. What are our last thoughts? Rimbaud’s great poem, The Drunken Boat suggests:

But no more tears. Dawns have broken my heart,
And every moon is torment, every sun bitterness;
I am bloated with the stagnant fumes of acrid loving

May I split from stem to stern and founder, ah founder! 

Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat

And what becomes of us if we drown, lost at sea?  In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sits on a rock, looking out to the sea:

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise landward. There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.

James Joyce, Ulysses 

And what becomes of the boat? The boat is driven by the wind and the seas. It has no helmsman, it has no destination, it seeks no port. It is always departing, it is never arriving.  It is no longer a closed, finite sanctuary. It embraces and protects no one. In time it ends up on the rocks or the lee shore. The fate of the drowned man and the boat is the same. They fall to the muck of the seafloor, decay in the saltwater; the man, the boat and the ocean are one. 

God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Stephen Dedalus and the Mother

Stephen Dedalus is struggling to create his identity as an artist. He decides to become a writer and a poet, and moves to Paris to escape the oppression of Ireland and Catholicism. Stephen was destined for the priesthood but he has rejected the church and is struggling with religion. All of this has broken his mother’s heart. After receiving news that his mother is dying, he returns to Dublin to a life of poverty and uncertain prospects. His mother lies on her deathbed but Stephen will not pray for her soul. He rejects her beliefs, her piety, her Catholicism. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen declares: 

I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

His mother weeps but he will not yield. He feels contempt for her weakness in facing death, and revulsion when looking at her old, decayed body, hearing the death rattle. She fills him with fear and dread.Her glazing eyes staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down.

James Joyce, Ulysses 

She sits up quickly and silently in the hospital bed, her faded blue eyes wide with fear, pale skin, breath rasping faintly, wanting comfort: the machines, the harsh electric lights, wires and tubes. Alone, abandoned in death’s fearful embrace. I do not look into her eyes. I do not provide comfort. I am repulsed, distant and contemptuous. I never dream of the mother; I never search for images of the mother. 

Stephen fears that his mother will steal his artistic soul, his identity as an artist, his reason for living. He will die without his art. 

No mother. Let me be and let me live.

James Joyce, Ulysses 

Stephen’s mother dies. 

I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost. Salt green death.

James Joyce, Ulysses 

Stephen is consumed with guilt over his refusal to pray for her soul. Did he kill his own mother? His mother’s ghost appears: an apparition fills him with guilt and fear:

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its lose brown graveclothes giving off an odor of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odor of wetted ashes.

James Joyce, Ulysses 

The son kills the mother, the mother kills the son; both are locked in a deathly embrace.

Ghouls, corpses, ashes. 

Mother, death, water. 

Dreams, horror, nightmares.

Wax, rosewood, ashes. 

Mother, death, water. 

The mother slays the son. 

The son slays the mother.

Mother, death, water. 

Dedalus has nightmares of being consumed by ghouls. He transforms his mother into an apparition that is the source of revulsion, fear and guilt. 

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him.

James Joyce, Ulysses

For Barthes, his mother is his life. The loss of his mother throws him into an existential crisis of suffering, despair and death. Barthes dreams of the loving essence of his mother. He seeks to resurrect her from the dead by writing memorials to his mother and to his suffering and by finding her essence in photographs. He cares for his mother during her illness and, in the process,  he becomes his mother and his mother becomes his daughter. 

During her illness, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 

For Dedalus, the mother is death, guilt and fear.

For Barthes, the mother is life, love and luminosity.

For Dedalus, the mother appears in hideous dreams: the apparition, the death rattle, rosewood and wet ashes. Fear and guilt: loveless. His mother is a thief and a murderer. She steals his artistic soul so that he will die.

For Barthes, the mother appears in dreams. He longs for the luminosity of his mother’s blue- green eyes, the color of the sea. He longs for her essence. He longs for her love. She sustains his life. 

After the death of his mother, Dedalus is left with guilt and the struggle for his soul. He searches in brothels and bars for maternal love through sex. He drinks to forget. 

After the death of his mother, Barthes falls into deep mourning. He searches old photographs to find his mother’s soul; he wants to resurrect his mother so they may be reunited. Without his mother, he is left with a life without “quality” (perhaps a pointless life) and love, and he can only wait for his own death.

Stephen: dreams, fear and guilt.

Stephen: let me be and let me live!

Barthes: dreams, loss and love.

Barthes: live so that I may live!

The Three Masted Ship

Joyce closes the Proteus Chapter of Ulysses with the following line: 

Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. 

The silence, the silent moving, a ghost ship, a death ship, a ship without a crew, lost at sea. No sound in silence. The womb of the ship is barren. The schooner moving upstream suggests the return of Ulysses to his home.  Ulysses needs the help of his son, Telemachus, to return. The father comes home to the son and the son comes back to the father.  Barthes cannot return to his father because he was lost at sea, his ship silenced, sunk, decayed into the depths and the muck of the ocean floor. 

The ships three masts symbolize the crosses on Calvary Hill.  Three souls are suspended on the high wooden spars.  Death of the three and silence. Is punctum the piercing of Christ on the Cross by the soldiers with their spears? The stigmata? Camera Lucida contains many references to piercing, lacerating, cutting, lashing and wounding. The punctum is the stigmata; it is time and death. 

I now know that there exists another punctum (another “stigmatum”) than the “detail.” This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

A ship with her sails furled cannot move upstream; it defies nature.  Is it a miracle? Does this suggest the resurrection of Christ who defeated time and death? Barthes hopes to resurrect his mother by defeating time and death by looking for her in old photographs.  Perhaps he hopes for a miracle. Is the schooner the ship that carries us to the other shore, away from the ordinary life of suffering, samsara and to the release of nirvana?  Will Stephen attain enlightenment? Will Barthes attain enlightenment by finding his mother and finally reaching a state of peace?

One day, the Buddha had a dream about the day he would realize his enlightenment. He went to the house of a devotee for his meal. She offered him food in a golden bowl. After the Buddha ate, he walked to the river and said: “If I am to become a Buddha today, then may the bowl go upstream, else let it go with the current.” The bowl floated upstream in the middle of the river and eventually disappeared in a whirlpool. That night the Buddha realized illumination.

The Buddha bowl moves upstream, the three masted ship moves upstream. They move against the currents of ordinary life. The Buddha attains enlightenment by taking the boat to the other shore. Christ attains enlightenment on the crosstree. In the zendo the monk strikes the bronze bowl at the base of the altar with the wood mallet three times. The bell tones are round, warm and resonant and then become angular, fading and falling faintly and falling into silence, faintly and softly. The incense stick falls into ash. 

Sisyphus, Barthes and the Mother

After his mother’s death, Barthes was in a state of despair. He lost his will to live. His life had no quality. 

Today, around 5:00 in the afternoon, everything is just about settled: a definitive solitude, having no other conclusion but my own death.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

He stops at a bakery for a cookie and the clerk said: “Voila”! This was one of his mother’s favorite words and she said it shortly before she died. Barthes breaks down in the bakery. In Mourning Diary, he writes:

The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment. That’s how I can grasp my mourning.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Barthes dreams of his mother in a struggle to resurrect her from death:

Each time I dream about her (and I dream only of her), it is in order to see her, believe her to be alive, but other, separate.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

The dreams only create more suffering:

Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me— O cruelty!— that I didn’t really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn’t true. The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

He looks at photographs of his mother to unite with her luminous self but photographs and dreams never create life; they cannot replicate a touch or a smile.  Photographs and dreams deceive us; they are only a catalyst for our thoughts, emotions and illusions. They never reveal the soul of the beloved, they never resurrect the beloved; they never reunite us with the beloved. They leave us in a state of melancholy and despair. Barthes struggles to resurrect his mother from dreams and images and ghosts and  light. 

Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Barthes compares his struggles to the labors of Sisyphus. In Camera Lucida we see a similar statement:

And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again. 

Roland, Barthes, Camera Lucida 

Why did Barthes choose Sisyphus to symbolize his failure to re-create his mother’s essence through dreams and photographs? Was it the meaningless and ultimate futility of his struggle? Did he feel that dreams and photographs are inherently deceitful like Sisyphus’ character?  Did he feel that he was a prisoner (perhaps of his mourning over his mother) like Sisyphus? Did he feel guilt over a crime and wish to be punished?

Sisyphus was the first king of Corinth. He was wicked and deceitful and betrayed the secrets of the Gods.  He imagined that he was more powerful than Zeus.  Zeus decided to punish Sisyphus for his betrayal and arrogance. He knew there was no punishment more severe than to condemn someone to meaningless labor for eternity. Zeus condemned Sisyphus to push a huge boulder to the top of a steep mountain but only to have it roll back down to the bottom and to start all over again and again. Sisyphus had no hope of escaping from his sentence; he must labor for all eternity, performing a meaningless labor. With nothing but frustration, defeat and despair as the reward. 

Unlike Sisyphus, Barthes chooses to climb the mountain; no God sentenced him to this action; his labors are self-imposed.  He climbs the mountain again and again, always searching for his mother’s  soul, always failing and returning to the base of the mountain. Barthes is free to abandon the struggle, whereas Sisyphus was condemned for all eternity. Of course, Barthes knew that he could never resurrect his mother through dreams and photographs. But why did he continue this fruitless struggle? Why did he not decide to climb a different mountain, with the hope of accepting his loss and releasing his suffering at the summit? Was he driven by compulsion, self-punishment, a desire to intensify his suffering?  Sisyphus labors for all eternity. Barthes labored until he died a few months after his mother. 

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus views Sisyphus as an absurd hero:

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told to us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over…

Albert Camus, They Myth of Sisyphus 

Camus subverts the standard interpretation of the story of Sisyphus and writes that Sisyphus was not condemned to work in futility and sorrow.  Rather, we can imagine that Sisyphus finds meaning in his work, even joy. Camus writes:  The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.  

We can find meaning in struggle even when our actions seem to be futile and accomplishing nothing. During the interval in which Sisyphus returns to the base of the mountain, Sisyphus finds meaning: he enjoys the ease of the down climb, the view of the valleys and mountains, the peacefulness of rest, the rhythm of his breath and the strength gained through his labors. Sisyphus is participating in the great cycle of life. Up and down, high and low, work and rest. Sisyphus laughs at the absurdity of it all.  Camus says that happiness and the absurd are the two sons of the earth: they are inseparable.  Can we laugh at the absurdity of our lives, at our defeats and despair, at our victories and joy because we know that life is a divine cosmological play, in which we are all gods playing the actors?

Sisyphus very cleverly escapes his punishment and defeats Zeus by turning his punishment into a source of  joy.  He knows that meaning is not found in the act of work itself; rather, meaning is found in our state of mind as we perform the work. We can view all work as intrinsically meaningless or meaningful. Thich Nhat Hahn, the great Buddhist teacher, says that we can find happiness in peeling and eating an orange if we can do it mindfully.  In the end, Sisyphus is more clever than Zeus because he finds peace, even enlightenment as he rolls the boulder up the mountain, endlessly. 

Unlike Sisyphus, Barthes condemns himself to meaningless work. He cannot find joy or in his search for his mother’s soul, no peace by looking at her photographs. He cannot look at the Winter Garden Photograph; the image is too painful. No matter how hard he works he never finds his mother’s essence, she is lost forever. He is defeated by his self-imposed punishment. 

Daedalus, Ariadne, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur

All the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

A labyrinthian man never seeks the truth, always only his Ariadne-whatever he may tell us.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Barthes is an artist who builds labyrinths out of words. He is a modern Daedalus and Camera Lucida is his labyrinth. We travel through its passages searching for the illusive center where we will discover photography’s essence.  The pathways branch and fork; twist and turn. Sometimes the path is simple and obvious; other times subtle and complex.  Some lead to dead ends and others to epiphanies. At every turn we encounter another question, another mystery, another enigma. But we do not find the center, we do not discover the answers, only more questions and dead ends. Now we cannot find our way out.  Perhaps we should not be surprised that Barthes builds a labyrinth with no center, with not resolution, with the only answer to the question being more questions. What is perfect reality and what is intractable illusion?

Minos, the king of Crete, prays to Poseidon, the sea god, to send him a snow-white bull, as a sign of supporting his kingdom. Poseidon sends him a beautiful white bull but he must kill the bull in his honor; however, Minos keeps the bull and sacrifices one of his own instead. He deceives Poseidon. Of course, Poseidon discovers the deception and punishes Minos be making Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife and a skilled practitioner of witchcraft, lust after the bull.  To satisfy her desires, Pasiphaë demands that Daedalus (the great inventor and artist) make a hollow wooden cow wrapped in cowhide to trick the white bull so that she could climb inside and mate with the bull. The offspring was the Minotaur: a monster with the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull.  Minos commissioned Daedalus to build a labyrinth to imprison the creature and to hide the shame of Pasiphaë. Daedalus built the labyrinth at Knossos, Crete; it was so complex that he almost could not find his way out. Minos ordered his vassals to regularly send him young virgin boys and girls. They were forced into the labyrinth as sacrifices to the gods; they were devoured by the Minotaur and were never seen again.

The labyrinth is an image of deep mystery that conceals dangerous secrets within its center.  It is a symbol, a metaphor and an archetype. It is an idea built upon complexity and multiplicity. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth may be seen as architecture built upon betrayal and shame. 

Valerie Morrison describes the labyrinth:

Kern starts us off with the labyrinth as metaphor for complexity, yet there is so much more – the labyrinth is frustrating, endless, interactive, a process of decision making, a journey, intricate, terrifying, threatening, inhabited by a monster, an initiation rite, an act of possible redemption and rejuvenation, and so on. It seems that the longer one looks at the labyrinth, the more interpretations and possibilities one sees. 

Valerie Morrison, The Labyrinth as Metaphor of Postmodern American Poetics

The labyrinth leads us down many twisting and turning paths, dead ends and blind alleys. It is designed to confuse us, to make us lose our way, and even to kill us if we arrive in the center and meet the Minotaur. In his  book, The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes describes the labyrinth:

Let’s imagine a Labyrinth without a central quid (neither Monster nor Treasure), so one that’s a-centric, which basically means a labyrinth without a final signified  to discover → Now, that might be the Metaphor for Meaning, in that it disappoints → Interpretation (detours, investigations, orientations) like a kind of mortal game, possibly with nothing at the center; here, again, the path would be equivalent to the goal–but only if you manage to get out (Rosenstiehl: the only mathematical problem presented by the labyrinth is how to find a way out). Imagine Theseus not finding the Minotaur at the center and yet sill turning back in the direction of . . . Ariadne, Love, Infidelity, “Life to no avail.”

Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

King Minos and Pasiphaë had a daughter named Ariadne. She was a goddess, muse and lover. She was the source of feminine wisdom and art. Her father put her in charge of sacrifices inside the labyrinth but she wanted to spare the victims by killing the Minotaur. The Athenian prince Theseus volunteered to be one of the victims and to help her vanquish the Minotaur.  Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and she gave him a sword and a ball of thread that she received from Daedalus so he could find his way out of the labyrinth. With the sword, he killed Minotaur, used the thread to escape the labyrinth and come out a hero. Fearing the wrath of Minos, he boarded the ship out of Crete and took Ariadne with him. Theseus had promised to marry Ariadne in return for her gifts but he abandoned her while she was sleeping by sailing away across the sea. He did not really love her.  She awakened to betrayal, lost love and heartbreak:

Strike deeper!

Strike one more time!

Stab, break this heart!

Why all this affliction

With blunt-toothed arrows?

How can you gaze evermore,

Unweary of human agony,

With the spiteful lightning eyes of gods?

You do not wish to kill,

Only to torment, torment?

Why torment—me,

You spiteful unknown god?

Nietzsche, Aridane’s Lament

Aphrodite promised Aridane a new lover to take the place of Theseus. She caused Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy, to fall in love with Ariadne.  They married and had many children. 

Minos was afraid of losing Daedalus, his master inventor, so he imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus within a tower. To escape, Daedalus invented wings made of wax and feathers; he managed to escape but Icarus drowned in the sea because he flew too close to the sun and the wax on his wings melted.

Joseph Campbell, in his famous work The Hero With A Thousand Faces, wrote that Ariadne’s thread was a symbol of hope:

Daedalus simply presented her with a skein of linen thread, which the visiting hero might fix to the entrance and unwind as he went into the maze. It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces 

The thread also represents direction and purpose; it is a way to return to the world after a long journey and a battle with a monster.  It gave Theseus a path to follow, a way out of the labyrinth and back to the world. The thread helps us keep track of the choices we have made in the past, the decisions and pathways we have taken; it is a map of our past travels to our present location. Even though the story concerns the death of the Minotaur, it is also about the return of the hero from a great adventure.

Photography is a vehicle with which we may explore the mysteries of death, time and memory.  Barthes’ wants to find the “truth of the face” of his mother by looking through his old photographs. As he enters the labyrinth of photographs and mysteries he writes:

The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death. 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The Winter Garden Photograph becomes Barthes’s guide, like Ariadne’s thread, for his quest to understand the essence of photography. But he loses the thread and becomes lost in the labyrinth. A turn of the labyrinth and his quest changes to search for his lost mother; another turn and he is mourning his mother’s death; and yet another turn and he contemplates photography as time and death. 

What do we make of the Minotaur in the center of the labyrinth? Does it represent death and are we charged to slay it?  Does it slay us? Are we mythic heroes on a dangerous journey through the labyrinth in search of wisdom?  If we escape, what wisdom can we bring to the commoners who never undertake the journey at all?

In our search to find wisdom in the center of the labyrinth, we may encounter death, perhaps the ultimate source of truth. Does our fear of death cause us to abandon our search? Do we turn back?  Does the Minotaur lurk around the next labyrinthian bend? At the end of Camera Lucida Barthes left us with the unanswered question; he never found the center, nor the way out.  Unlike Daedalus, Barthes built a labyrinth that he could not escape. Barthes died shortly after having completed Camera Lucida; he did not escape from the labyrinth, he was slain by a Minotaur of his own making. 

What if the center of Camera Lucida contains neither a monster nor wisdom? What if there is nothing to discover? Barthes gave us neither a sword to slay the Minotaur nor a thread to find our way out of the labyrinth. At the end of Camera Lucida Barthes poses the unanswered question: is the essence of photography truth or hallucination?  We must enter the labyrinth and define our own questions and find our own essential truth. For Barthes, the truth was the Winter Garden Photograph. What is the photograph that lives in the center of your labyrinth? Does it lead you to your death?

Where is my labyrinth? Who is my Ariadne? Who is my muse, my lover, my protector goddess on my search for truth? Where is her thread? Where is her sword? Can I trust my Aridane? Can she trust me? Will she lead me out of the labyrinth to life and freedom or will she deceive me and abandon me to search lost in the maze until I meet my death at the hands of the Minotaur?  Where is my photograph that lives at the center of the labyrinth, guarded by the Minotaur?

Camera Lucida looks like a koan expressed as a novella. It has no center; it is a void, an empty space. There is no logical, analytical answer to Barthes’ stated question and intention in writing the book; our intellects are frustrated to the point of paralysis and stillness. This creates space for our minds to open. In Zen, this is the moment of awakening. We are not pierced by image and suffering, we are pierced by the Zen arrow of satori. 

Rhizomes expand and spread like streams of water; they flow downward drawn by gravity, they find the spaces between the fissures in the rocks. They move like the watercourse way of the Tao, always to the lowest point. There are ripples on the water caused by the winds, a splash from a rock rolling into the pond.The water re-establishes its equilibrium, returns to stillness, reflecting the mirror-like scene, the currents below the surface, forces flowing, moving, unseen. 

I Become the Boats and the Water 

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease—
No more tangled, hung-up mind,
I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,
Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat. 

Han Shan

The river is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry.

The river is neither moving nor still, neither cold nor hot.

The river is neither being nor non-being, neither delusion nor enlightenment. 

Dogen

I sit by the river and watch the boats and the sunlight reflecting on the water in the canal.

I sit by the river and watch the sunlight reflecting on the pool of water in the bottom of the boat. 

I sit by the river and let my mind become still. The boats rise and fall, leave and return, weather and decay.

The river and the boats are in constant movement. 

Even though the sun is greater than the earth, it is reflected in the pool of water at the bottom of the boat. 

Even though the sun is greater than the sea1, it is reflected in one drop of water. 

The sunlight reflecting in the river is in constant movement.

The boat rocks in the river.

The pool of water in the bottom of the boat rocks in the river.  

The pool of water in the bottom of the boat reflects the sunlight. 

The paint fades, the algae grows, the boards weather, crack, decay.

The flowers and plants grow in the mud in the bottom of the boat. 

The flowers and plants die and decay in the mud in the bottom of the boat.

No self and no boat is like the sun reflected in the pool of water at the bottom of the boat. 

In the pool of water at the bottom of the boat the sun does not get wet. 

The river is thus. 

Just so!

I Become the Boat and the 10,000 Things

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.

They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging. Knowing constancy is insight.

Lao Tzu, Tao  Te Ching, Verse 16

I am empty. 

The boat is empty.

I become the pool of water at the bottom of the boat.

I become the leaves floating on the pool of water at the bottom of the boat. 

I become the trash floating on the pool of water at the bottom of the boat.

I become the sunlight reflecting on the pool of water at the bottom of the boat.

I become the reflections of the clouds and the trees in the pool of water at the bottom of the boat. 

I become the ropes coiled in the bottom of the boat. 

I become the sunlight reflecting on the river. 

I become the shadow in the water below the bow of the boat. 

I become the light and the dark and the form. 

I become the boat.

I become the water. 

I become the flower. 

I become the smile. 

I become the 10,000 things. 

Boat. 

No boat. 

I.

Not I. 

I Become Moonlight  Beach and the 10,000 Things

I am empty.

I  become the clouds. 

I become the blue sky.

I become the blue ocean.

I become the breaking wave.

I become the sea sounds. 

I become the sail boats on the horizon.

I become the sails and the wind. 

I become the palm trees. 

I become the sand on the beach. 

I become the sunlight. 

I become the shadows of telephone poles and wires. 

I become the shadows on the house walls. 

I become the gate and the fence. 

I become the door and the window. 

I become the empty alleys.

I become the empty streets.

I become the flower. 

I become the smile. 

I become the 10,000 things. 

Sea.

No sea. 

I.

Not I. 

I Become Utrechtsestrasse and The 10,000 Things

I am empty.

I become the glass of the shop windows.

I become the reflections of the shop windows across the street. 

I become the red bricked houses reflected in the shop windows across the street. 

I become the tram car and the reflections of the red bricked houses in its

windows. 

I become the cable wires over the street. 

I become the tables and chairs and photographs in the cafes. 

I become the flowers. 

I become the smile. 

I become the manikins in the windows. 

I become the bicycles parked on the street. 

I become the canal and the water. 

I become the boats floating on the canals. 

I become the trees over the canals. 

I become the reflections of the red bricked houses, trees and boats in the canals. 

I become the 10,000 things. 

Reflections

No reflections.

I.

Not I.