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Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Absence as Presence

August 10, 2014 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

roland-barthes-camera-lucidaI have a love affair with books on photography. Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Mind’s Eye, and now Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

I suppose I’m drawn to commentary of photography because photographs provide such a moment for existential reflection—such an everlasting moment (a paradoxical phrase that in itself defines photography’s poignancy). Each photograph resides in a prism: the intent of a pose, the person caught unawares, the gaze trapped in time. Each photograph tells the smallest part of a much bigger story.

And then I love Barthes, who writes more like a poet than a philosopher. It seems as if he touches each word with his fingertips. He’s a sensualist, a memoirist, in the best of ways; his thought, as complex as it is in all of its theorizing and decodings, always traipses through life, the drifts of memory.

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, in which Sartre discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness. His conclusion is that because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it.

The interplay between exterior and interior forms our relationship with photography as well—which “divides the history of the world,” says Barthes. Photography forces us to believe in the past in all of its incongruities. How differently would we view history, after all, not to mention our own lives, without photography?

Consider the photos of oneself over a lifetime. Barthes says we want our photographs to correspond with our “self,” even in our various poses over time, which show a transient notion of self more than a solid core. Each time we pose for a photograph, we assert a self to the future viewer: “I am happy,” or “I am beautiful,” or “I am intelligent” (or “I am a pissed-off teen who doesn’t want to be in this photo,” which marked many of my early photos). A photograph can never correspond to our self, though. Barthes says, “…’myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and ‘myself’ which is light, divided, dispersed.”

The most interesting part of the book is Barthes’ framework for viewing photos through studium and punctum. Studium denotes the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph; punctum denotes the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within a photograph.

“A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me),” Barthes posits.

Most photos don’t prick, though. They provoke only polite interest because they are invested with studium. “The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like.” Think of the photos in advertisements, in hotel lobbies, or the posed family photos that do little to reveal the people in them (so they are themselves advertisements in the end).

“What I can name cannot really prick me,” he says of studium.

It is the ineffable that makes art arresting; its meaning resides in its ability to disturb. The wound provides its own particular, strange salve. When I survey the books I love, the photos and paintings I return to again and again, they all stare at me from an abyss I can’t quite fathom. They tell, and they don’t tell. They’re beguiling, elusive, yet demanding.

Barthes applies that concept to erotic photographs. Truly erotic photographs (or stories for that matter, I’d also argue) don’t make sexual organs the central object of viewing; instead the erotic takes the spectator outside its frame. The punctum is a subtle beyond, in other words, the desire that is imagined.

Despite being a prick, punctum isn’t about shock value, though. “Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

Thinking, shaping, as opposed to recording, as people often think of photography. Photography has always struggled for a place in the arts because it can seem as simple as pushing a button to open and close the shutter. But as anyone who has ever tried to take a compelling portrait knows, it’s more than a quick snap. “The great portrait photographers are the great mythologists,” Barthes says.

Written after his mother’s death, Camera Lucida is as much a reflection on death as it is on photography. Death and photography co-mingle in a way no other art does. “The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph),” writes Barthes. “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.”

Therein lies its haunting, disturbing quality: photography attests to our mortality. “The photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object, but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.”

Whereas film presents the flow of continuous time—the absence of the past, in effect—a photograph breaks our notions of continuity. So the punctum “is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation.”

The photos that reveal such a punctum of time for me are the photos that cause me to pause in my stream of Facebook photos. Friends sometimes post photos of their dead parents, parents I grew up with, and I look at them at once like the little boy who stood beside them, yet also like the adult who knows the circumstances of their aging and death. It’s an incongruity I can’t quite reconcile, an incongruity that always wounds. Photography allows us to look into a dead person’s eyes while they’re alive (or vice versa).

As Sontag says in On Photography, “Photography is the inventory of mortality. …Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”

Barthes searches through photos of his mother for what he calls “the air”: “that exorbitant thing which induces from body to soul—animula, little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.” He finds photos that only give him her crudest identity, her “legal status,” until he finds one that he calls the “Winter Garden Photograph,” in which he cries, “There she is!” It’s a likeness he compares to the Buddhist notion of satori, in which words fail—“a kind of intractable supplement of identity, what is given as an act of grace, stripped of any importance.”

Such a moment defines the “new form of hallucination” photography provides: it’s false on the level of perception because “it is not here,” but true on the level of time because “it has indeed been.”

And so we look for ourselves and the death of ourselves when we look at photographs. Absence, forever present.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Photography

Francesca Woodman: Model Upside Down on the Stairs

October 4, 2012 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I’d never written a story to a photo before a friend and I swapped photos for a 100-word story exercise a couple years ago. She gave me a photo by Francesca Woodman. I didn’t know who Francesca Woodman was. The photo was about as arresting and disturbing as a photo can be: a beautiful nude woman, blurry and abandoned, sprawled upside down on a stairway that has a cracked mirror at the bottom.

My story was very literally titled “Model Upside Down on the Stairs.” The photo overwhelmed the story, of course, although I managed to recently publish it in PANK, which just published an interview with me about the story as well.

The model in the photo is elegant and poised, yet doomed and falling, and contorted in a way that begs the question of what has happened to her, how has she lost herself. It’s a photo that demanded a story, simply because of its irreconcilable contradictions, which was why I was surprised when I went to the Francesca Woodman exhibit at SF MOMA last December and read on a placard that Woodman wasn’t a narrative photographer.

I jotted down my rebuttal to that notion as I studied her haunting excavations of self. She took most of her photos in a rundown apartment house while at the Rhode Island School of Design, posing nude with broken mirrors and crumbling walls in a style reminiscent of 19th century spirit photography, her photos playful but taunting, erotic but not quite erotic, a self blurred but wanting to be seen. Unfortunately, I lost that notebook, but my conclusion was that her photos told a quite courageous and troubling narrative. She’s the type of artist brave enough to empty her innards yet remain inscrutable at the same time.

She killed herself at the age of 22 in 1981. A friend of mine posited that she was sexually abused. Many photos certainly hint at that, perhaps especially the one of the black, muddy handprints on her breasts and her crotch. And then there is a series called “Charlie the Model,” one of few that includes a man. In one picture he kneels naked next to a mirror while Woodman stands, also nude, behind him. She is blurred, as if she’s violently recoiling from him, affronted and afraid of his sexuality.

Some photos appear innocent by contrast, however. She revels in the play of self, embracing the angelic and the demonic, the naïf and the seductress. I’ve read critics who disparage her work as sentimental and melodramatic, but that’s part of the reason I like it; her photos possess the daring verve of youth, the ability to scream while not wanting anyone to respond. In fact, her family and professors didn’t know about the wide body of her work until after she’d died.

The question with photographers like Woodman is how much they truly want to be known, how much they even want to know themselves. In so many photos her body blurs into a wall. She wants to appear even as she disappears. Dematerialization is one of her themes. It seems as if she’s exploring the poses one has to travel through to discover or create the final pose of self, as if there is a final pose, but she’s dodging herself all the time, even in her states of nakedness, making sure no one can truly know her.

Thank God for the Francesca Woodmans of the world, although I wish she would have lived longer, discovered the restful state that sometimes can only come with age, and come out from her wispy smudges of self to be seen. Her fervency would have surely faded, but perhaps she would have slowed down, finally told her story. Inscrutability comes with a price, and screams usually want to be heard.

Filed Under: Blog, The Writing Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: Creative Process, Photography

On Susan Sontag…On Photography…Again

September 23, 2006 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

A collection of quotes and thoughts upon randomly picking up On Photography one evening while killing time…

On being a freak
“The subjects of Arbus’s photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village,” Sontag writes. “Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman’s democratic vista), everybody is shown to look the same.”

But in Arbus’s sameness, we’re really all freaks. Isn’t that her message? I suppose it’s easy to look at Arbus’s photos and think of how separate her subjects are from us. That’s a shallow gaze, though. To look into freaks’ eyes and see a normal, everyday person–hey, just like me–is the revelation.

The flaneur
“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’”

This is the joy I always felt when I walked the city with a camera dangling from my neck. Everything was beautiful, sexual, available to my view. I was nothing but a random collector of the odd, the discarded, the scribbles on lonely walls.

“Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually one’s own.”

Inevitably, especially with the passage of time, when we look at photos or take photos, we traipse through the different worlds of our different selves, looking and wondering, yes, like a tourist. What could I have been thinking? How oddly I dressed back then? Was it difficult to live back then? These are the questions I ask of the wax dummies of historical figures when I tour their homes. My life is suddenly a version of a reality show produced in another era.

Or, I take a photo of a person, and their life is a short vacation, a snapshot, escape.

The present
“…photography offers instant romanticism about the present.”

I suppose it depends on the subject. So much of the present is impossible to romanticize, simply because it exists now. Photos of Bill Clinton might be quite mysterious, worthy of pauses and ponderings, but only twenty or thirty years from now. Now we gaze with such intensity at the photos of Kennedy, or even Nixon. Their lives possess an aura again, no matter how overexposed they might be.

No, I think photography attempts to romanticize the present, but most of the time it fails.

Death
“Photography is the inventory of mortality. …Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”

Photographs have replaced the stories of our ancestors. It’s enough to see their faces. We don’t really need to know their stories, the details of their lives. It’s enough to see them, as if they’re living, to look into their eyes, to see a person. We are there with them, yet not.

Collecting
“In a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.”

This is perhaps where the romanticism of the present comes in. Collecting the present, especially those numinous things that speak of mystery, of other worlds, is the joy, the motivation of any photographer, whether he or she is collecting faces or fauna or flora. To capture the aura of what seems to be original and true and perhaps everlasting—and to desire not to reproduce it too often, to blemish it in any way—defines the impulse toward art, I think.

It is the religion of the salvage collector. Photography becomes a beautiful way to pick up the world’s trash—to see a new beauty in what is vanishing as Walter Benjamin put it.

“The photographer—and the consumer of photographs—follows in the footsteps of the ragpicker,” as Sontag says.

She quotes Baudelaire: “Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects. . . . He sorts things out and makes a wise choice; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, the refuse which whill assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.”

Changing the world?
“Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose we collect it.”

The choice is almost whether to prevent the apocalypse or to try to understand it or to remove oneself one step further and simply watch it.

I’ve thought about how to prevent the apocalypse, but I’m one who either tries to understand it or is resigned, content to watch the world self-destruct. I’d hate to value one choice over another, as Marx might. I think each role is important, even that of us passive ones. It seems that we might see something that others don’t. And if they ask us what we’ve seen, it might just help them.

Attractiveness
“We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph. Photographs create the beautiful and—over generations of picture-taking—use it up.”

This statement is true and not true. It’s the crux of our aesthetic position in our media saturated world. Perhaps it’s actually aging, our inherent habituation, which causes photographs to lose their power. A James Dean photo won’t look as cool with each decade’s viewing, yet he’s still a pretty cool guy. The next generation will think so as well.

A sunset in real life might be the corny sunset of a photo, but what happens when these two worlds collide—and, as is sometimes the case, the real sunset is enhanced by the romanticism of the photographed sunset, and life becomes augmented, almost doubled?

Filed Under: Blog, Susan Sontag Tagged With: Photography

Susan Sontag

September 13, 2006 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

The excerpts of Susan Sontag’s journals in last Sunday’s Times revealed two interesting things about her: a tendency for self-loathing mixed with flashes of insight, especially on the nature of being a writer.

I suppose I know why self-loathing is such a frequent character trait of “greatness,” at least if I play the role of an armchair psychologist. Susan Sontag obviously possessed such a powerful need to be accepted on a grand scale—she needed the accolades of brilliance as much as she needed the sustenance of brilliance—and so drove herself mightily and crazily to be a part of intellectual life in the city, and to merit high standing among its secular priesthood.

The excerpts from her journals provided a few good quotes on the nature of writing (and a couple of little life lessons) among the jims and jams of sorting out who she was and who she could be:

Writing and moralizing
“It’s corrupting to write with the intent to moralize, to elevate people’s moral standards.”

Writing and egotism
“Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too? With a little ego-building — such as the fait accompli this journal provides — I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said.”

Truth and time
“There is no stasis. To stand still is to fall away from the truth; the inner life dims and flickers, starts to go out, as soon as one tries to hold fast. It’s like trying to make this breath serve for the next one, or making today’s dinner do the work of next Wednesday’s as well. . . .Truth rides the arrow of time.”

Fear of aging
“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”

The American struggle to write
“In every important modern American writer you feel a struggle with the language–it’s your enemy, doesn’t naturally work for you. (Completely different in England, where the language is taken for granted.) You have to subdue it, reinvent it.”

It’s certainly refreshing to hear any author recognize egotism as a motive for being a writer, not to mention the love affair with the persona of being a writer. All writers possess both, I’m convinced, as much as any trait.

Both characteristics have motivated me (without payoff, but with satisfaction). In fact, I yearn for the days when playing out the persona of a writer filled up my soul. It’s always a wonderful feeling to be able to walk into a room with dashing hopes and reckless confidence, even if you don’t have a product to show for it. The problem with age is that you need the product. No one will let you play pretend anymore. You can’t say “I want to be a writer,” because if you’ve wanted to be a writer, you should be one by now.

Filed Under: Blog, Susan Sontag, writing process Tagged With: Creative Process, Photography

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Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of 100 Word Story, writer, tap dancer, alchemist, contortionist, numbskull, preacher. Read More…

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