"Photographeme: Mythologizing in Camera Lucida" by Jolanta Wawrzycka.
Copyright © 1998-2004 Jolanta W. Wawrzycka.

This essay appeared in a book Writing the Image: After Roland Barthes,
 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

In the process of reading and analyzing Barthes last book, Camera Lucida," I kept experiencing a forking of my sensibilities. On the one hand I was taken by clever and convincing elucidation of pictures scattered throughout the text, yet on the other hand, I kept resisting the alarmingly reductive "readings" of the photographs, as well as phenomenological leap of faith that I felt invited to perform. But before I elaborate, let me reveal something about my own attitude to photographs. I do so encouraged by the subtitle to the English version of Camera Lucida, "Reflections of Photography."

I remember my very early childhood experience with photographs. When I asked my mother how come that I had never had grandparents, she replied that, of course I had them; everybody did, it was just that mine were dead. She walked to the library shelf and took down a big, leather-bound photo-album with silver clasps, browsed through it, and pulled out three rectangular cardboard or plastic-like, cards. In one were two brown patches that coincided with the shapes I was so fond of drawing at that time and calling them "Mom and Dad." She said that the patches were her mom and dad. "Did you draw them?" "No; they are zdjecia" (the Polish word for "pictures," literally meaning "taking-offs" or "removals"). Two shapes--people--in one photograph were looking in my direction. In the other two "removals," the same people were looking at me more obviously; I had adjusted to recognize the patches as faces. Yet my mind could not hold that adjustment for long. It still perceived the content of the cards as brownish shapes; they could not be Mom's mom and dad for how could they fit into the rectangle that I was holding in my hand? And how could they be there in front of me if they were dead?

Eventually, like all children, I learned how to look at the photographs, but my "learned" behavior never fully displaced those first impressions of photos as just flat paper objects with patches on them, with fancifully cut edges and long-expired addresses of photo studios where the "taking off" took place. To this day, as I ponder the Polish word zdjecie, "taking off" or "removal," I keep wondering, Taking off of what from where? or Removal of what, from where, and where to?" I never had that problem with drawings. Like all children who draw, I somehow understood that I was imitating what I saw; I was aware of the process through which pictures I drew came into being--an aspect entirely missing from my relationship to a photograph until I was eleven or so, when I studied optics as a part of science curriculum in physics, the concepts of "camera obscura" and "camera lucida" as a part of both physics and "History of Ideas" curricula, supplemented by my extracurricular "exposure" to photography.

Given all I have said so far, my re-reading of Camera Lucida could only cause the epistemological split in me. To be fair, Barthes did occasionally approach a satisfactory--for me--definition of photography, but he also ducked each time. He asserts that photography is never distinguished from its referent, carrying it with itself (CL, 5),

united by an eternal coitus. The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape [...] Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive (I didn't yet know that this stubbornness of the referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for) (CL, 6; emphasis added).

Striving to answer the question why certain referents arrest, or "puncture," or "prick" him while others leave him close to neutral, Barthes abandons one of those "leaves of laminated objects," the windowpane, and analyzes just the landscape. Ultimately, a photograph emerges as just a mimetic and evocative image. Barthes reads that image as a text and responds to it by employing the apparatus of sensory perceptions, eidetics, and good old interpretation-- he tools of the modernist, aesthetic approach to texts, long buried by postmodernists. To me Camera Lucida obscures the physicality, the whatness, of a photograph, its photosynthetic metareality registered on photosensitive film/paper by a mechanical device of prearranged lenses that trap light rays and trick them into mimesis. My own bias forever prevents me from considering a photograph to be purely mimetic and "thematic." But then, in line with what I demand from my students, I decided to grant Barthes his terms, mainly because the lisible was quite apparent to me; it was the scriptible, the self-conscious and the resistant in me, that kept interfering.

In analyzing his "photographic 'knowledge'" (CL, 9), Barthes explores three practices that result in a final product, the photograph. They are expressed by the infinitives "to do," which involves the Operator or the Photographer; "to look," which engages the Spectator; and "to undergo," which involves the target, or the referent. The "Operator's photograph" is linked to "the vision framed by the keyhole of the camera obscura" (CL, 10) and to the processes of looking, framing, and perspectivizing. The "Spectator's photograph" descends from the "chemical revelation of the object (from which I receive, by deferred action, the rays)[...]" (CL, 10) Thus a given photograph is always seen by Barthes as a qualified (an appropriated) object resulting from a process and always seen in relation to the human perception. The it, the nominality (or should I say, the object-ivity?) of the photograph itself is absent from this otherwise satisfactory configuration. Barthes analyzes the effects that photographs have on the Spectators by introducing the notions of studium and punctum. Through the photograph's studium the Spectator's interest is aroused based on the cultural recognition of the photographer's intention (CL, 26-27), whereas through its punctum the spectator breaks away from the polite interest aroused by the studium: "punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)." (CL, 27) Thus, on the one hand, Barthes definition of photography coincides with mine, when he asserts that:

Technically, Photography is at the intersection of two quite distinct procedures; one of a chemical order: the action of light on certain substances; the other of the physical order: the formation of the image through an optical device. (CL, 10)

On the other hand, however, the object resulting from that intersection--the physical sheet of photographic paper--is overlooked, or rather, looked-through, its referent so much ridden with subjectivity and intentionality, that it is here where my epistemological forking begins. Yet it is also at this crossroad that I find myself immersed in Barthes' text deeply enough to want to continue the pleasure of the text and my own process of discovery.

Here is why. Barthes defines the referent as "any eidolon emitted by the object which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to 'spectacle' and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead." (CL, 9) This notion of death arrests me. It is so obvious that it actually surprises me. After all, the pedestrian reason why we all take pictures is in diametrical opposition to death: pictures immortalize the moment, preserve it for eternity. And here, I suppose, lies the essence of what surprises me: my own insistence on the physicality of a photograph as an object has so far prevented me from realizing the extent to which photographs, for me, always also inscribed time. I have always been aware that when people talk about their photographs, they usually resort to metonymy ("This is X at the seaside..." or "This is X and Y in the Alps..." when they really mean "This is a piece of photographic paper imaging X or Y....). I, on the other hand, usually resort to narration: "This was taken when I was here and there...", or "This is what my parents looked like when they got married..." Invariably a story, but always prompted by a "pre-text," an object called a photograph.

I suppose I carried this habit from my native language, in which, although it is correct to say "This is X..." when one means a picture, it is more habitual to point out to "a picture of X." It was Chomsky who called language "a mental organ." My growing a new organ called "English" certainly did not eradicate the old organ called "Polish," though it might have atrophied it. One of the cells of that "Polish" mental organ, the concept of photography, has to do first, with the physicality of the object called "photograph," and only secondly with the phenomenological dimensions of the subject-turned-object. But it is the latter that preoccupies Barthes when he asserts: "Photography transform[s] subject into object" (CL, 13)--a clear and obvious enough assertion, although for me, photography also transforms the resulting object (the picture) into subject (of the stories I love to tell as I show my photos to those few interested).

The fact that Barthes sees the notion of death configured into photography reminded me of some older folk from the Poland-chapter of my life who would not be photographed if their life depended on it. In a way it did; they lived under the spell of superstition that to have one's picture taken meant to die soon. Death, then. Barthes is quite explicit, albeit metaphorical, on the subject of death. He regards a photograph to be "flat death" (CL, 92). In one sense, he reflect that whenever he is being photographed, that is, whenever he experiences himself as subject-becoming-an-object, he undergoes a "micro-version of death: [he is] truly becoming a specter [...] Death in person" (CL, 14). Death is precisely what he seeks in the photograph of him: "Death is the eidos of that Photograph" (CL, 15). While viewing photographs of himself, he finds his desire clinging to the SOUND he remembers made by the camera as the photographer's finger triggers the shutter (the finger being a less terrifying organ that his eye):

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches--and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to the techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. (CL, 15; emphasis added)

It seems that for Barthes, then, "noise of Time" counterbalances Death encoded in the photograph of himself. For me, the stories triggered by the pictures of my family and myself do the same. In this context, Barthes' concepts of studium and punctum emerge as the "tools" that enable him to view photographs other that those of himself. Rather than as "flat death," he sees them from a variety of points of view: as adventure, as information, according to their ability to paint, to surprise, to signify, to waken desire, or to produce satori. His method of analysis, "a casual, even cynical phenomenology," is steeped in a paradox of wanting, on the one hand, "to give name to Photography's essence" as an eidetic science," and recognizing, on the other hand, that Photography, always a "contingency, singularity, risk" (CL, 20), participates in what he calls, "banality." Barthes' recognition that "Classical phenomenology [...] had never [...] spoken of desire or mourning," forces him to abandon "the path of formal ontology" (CL, 21) and retain only his desire and grief. Thus he cannot separate the essence of photography "from the 'pathos' of which, from the first glance, it consists." (CL, 21) He is interested in Photography only for "sentimental" reasons: "I want to explore it [...] as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think." (CL, 21)

Barthes supplements this affective essence of photography by yet another element, satori. He arrives at the notion of satori via the agency of punctum. Noting the trick of vocabulary, "to develop a photograph" (49), Barthes points out that "what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound) [...]" (CL, 49). That essence can only be repeated but never transformed. Barthes likens the effect to that of the Haiku: "For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking a desire for or even a possibility of a rhetorical expansion" (CL, 49). This "intense immobility," however, seems to be at odds with the energy implicit in punctum, though, by linking it with satori, Barthes comes close to Joyce's notion of epiphanic stasis in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart" (Portrait, 213).

But ultimately, satori brings Barthes back to the referent of photography: that "necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would have been no photograph" (CL, 76). He refers to it as "that-has-been" of photography: its interfuit.

What I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred. It is all this which the verb intersum means. (CL, 77)

For Barthes, this is the genius of Photography and its horror: a photograph simultaneously testifies to the presence of a thing at a certain past moment and to its absolute pastness, its death. By attesting that what we see had indeed existed, Photography partakes in the economy of Death and Resurrection (CL, 82) and it is in this context that Barthes analyses the 1898 Winter Garden Photograph of his mother when she was five years old.

Barthes' goal in looking through the photographs of his mother after she died was to find "the truth of the face" he had loved (CL, 67). As he enters the labyrinth of those photographs, he confesses:

I knew that at the center of this labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietzsche's prophecy: 'A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth but only his Ariadne'. The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death. (CL, 73)

Here, Photography's banality and pathos are joined by "the melancholy of Photography" (CL, 79) The intentional/emotional pursuits of Barthes' quasi-phenomenological investigations cancel out the operation of studium and punctum that works fairly well when he investigates photographs other that those of himself and his mother. Actually, his phenomenological perspective borders on phenomenological fallacy, so much is it invested in fictionalizing, mythologizing and spinning of the novelistic thread of "love and death" (that parallels the paradigm of life and death he mentions later ([CL, 92])--which is no different from my own fictionalizing, mythologizing and storytelling pre-written in and by my photographs. All photographs, as Barthes hastens to remind us, are "reduced to a simple click, one separating the initial pose from the final print" (CL, 92). And that mythologized print has the capacity to function as Ariadne's thread thanks to the "luminous rays" and the optic of the camera obscura, in other words, thanks to the discovery that "made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object" (CL, 80):

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed (CL, 80-81).

The umbilical cord links the "this-will-be" of the referent with the "this-has-been" experienced by the Spectator, leaving the latter always pondering "over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead," adds Barthes, "every photograph is this catastrophe" (CL, 96).

For Barthes, the light that reaches the Spectator literally resurrects the referent from flat death. In photographs of relatives, the rays reveal/confirm the Spectator's resemblance to the referent, thus conforming to the Spectator's notion of the subject's identity: all photographs of my mother's parents look like all other photographs of her parents; all photographs of Barthes' mother look like all other photos of her. Barthes sees the equation between resemblance and identity as "an absurd, purely legal, even penal affair" (CL, 102). Skeptical about his mother's likeness, he finds "the splendor of her truth" only in the Winter Garden Photograph, "one which does not look 'like' her," the photograph of a child he never knew (CL, 103)

The affective conclusion, disappointingly enough, does not yield any new insights into the nature of that truth about his mother that Barthes has set out to find through this book. The photograph can only authenticate the existence of his mother before he could have possibly known her. The sign of her face undergoes a process of mythologization as he finds in it "something inexpressible: evident (this is the law of the Photograph) yet improbable (I cannot prove it)" (CL, 107). To be sure, he also traces what he calls "genetic features" and lineage in the photograph; he discovers "the air," or expression, a look, through which he glimpses her soul, animula (CL, 109), all of which (a leap of faith by a loving son) contributes to the intentionality-laden affective "myth" of his mother's soul, as it reduces her to a metaphor of his own experience. None of this could have possibly been experienced by any other spectator who, in viewing the Winter Garden Photograph, would have, at best, imparted a polite studium upon it, a fact only too well realized by Barthes who, for that very reason, does not reproduce this picture, crucial to his study. Such a built-in aporia inherent in the text of Camera Lucida is one of the elements that produce desire in the reader who, deprived of the visual illustration of Barthes' point, pursues the textual solution, but reaches none--the latter, like the former, relies on the economy of the void.

The flat death of the photograph encodes at once the pastness of the once-present moment and the click that "shot," "removed" that moment into the future from which the Spectator can view it as past. For Barthes,' the possibility of repetition, that is, the mechanistic reproduction of photographs, translates into resurrection; his mythologizing could be viewed as participating in the economies of death and rebirth, or, more poignantly, in rebellion against the inescapability of "flat death." By the same token, my story-telling may, too, be a rebellion against the morbid semantic implications of the Polish word "zdjecie," or "removal," and against the colloquial English word "shot," the latter being for ever marked for me to the point that I never use the phrase, "to take a shot."

Is it because of the family mythology hidden behind those old photographs of my grandparents, those "patches" my mother showed me when I was little? Later I learned that my grandfather was shot in 1946 by the NKVD:1 he had to be removed since he was an officer in AK, the Polish Home Army, that opposed the invading Red Communist Army and supported the London-based Polish government-in-exile.2 But it all began on November 10, 1944, the day before my mother's birthday, when my grandfather had mysteriously disappeared. Rumor had it that he, along with other officers, had been taken prisoner by the Nazis. For seven months my grandmother made trips to Lublin's Castle, which had been turned into a Nazi prison, to delivered food parcels to her husband. One day late in June 1945, the truck that she was riding to the prison was bombed by the retreating Germans. My grandmother, fatally injured, died on Sunday, July 1, 1945. She was thirty-seven. Six months later, on January 22, 1946, my grandfather unexpectedly reappeared. It turned out that all this time he had been in a labor camp in Russia. He managed to escape only to return home and find his wife dead and his two teenage daughters in care of his wife's mother. Five days later, on Sunday January 27, 1946 he was removed by the NKWD. My mom had found him shot, lying face down in the snow outside the house. He was forty-five.

Whenever I re-remember this story, the patches on the old photographs evolve into two faces that cease for an instant to represent "flat death." Initially a studium for me, the photographs evolve. The luminous rays that emanate from the two faces engender punctum in me, not so much by the referents themselves, as by the interfuit, the "this-has-beenness" of what I apprehend. My gaze then turns inward--satori--and for a fleeting moment I see myself, incredulously, a descendant of those unknown deceased, a living seed of death connected to those faces by the umbilical cords of luminous rays emanating from them. After Roland Barthes, how else could I view these three photographs?

Endnotes

1. NKVD: (Narodny Kommissariat Vnutriennikh Del, or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) was a Soviet police agency responsible for internal security and corrective labor camps. Concerned mainly with political offenders, the NKVD used its broad investigative and judicial powers to carry out Stalin's massive purges of the 1930s. In March 1946 it became the Ministry of Internal Affairs. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15^th ed., s.v. "Poland, History of" p. 652).

2. Polish government-in-exile was formed in France in 1939, based on 1935 constitution. As civil and military resistance movement had formed in occupied Poland in September 1939 after the German invasion, the Polish government-in-exile assured the survival of the Polish Republic under the leadership and supreme command of general Sikorski. It moved to the United Kingdom after the defeat of France in 1940. (Britannica, ibid).