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BOOK REVIEW
BARTHES ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Roland Barthes (1984). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by
Richard Howard (London: Fontana).
INTRODUCTION
Roland Barthes is the best known semiologist in the world; he was to France what
Umberto Eco was to Italy. When Barthes died in 1980, semiology was already well-
established in the French academy. Within a few years however it was to percolate
into mainstream literary criticism in many parts of the world. Barthes was not an
expert on photography or any of the areas that he subjected to semiological analysis
with the exception of literature. Nonetheless these reflections on photography which
are informed by his interests in areas like linguistics, sociology, semiology, and
psychoanalysis will be of interest to a wide range of readers. Barthes’s reflections
will be particularly of interest to those preoccupied with theories of representation
that involves comparing the semiology of graphic design, the semiology of painting,
and the semiology of photography. Barthes’s intent in writing this book is not to
provide us with a formal theory of photography; or to teach us how to take
photographs. His intent is to merely share with us a few spontaneous reflections on how
he interprets photographs. This book is structured as a series of forty-eight brief
reflections with some of the actual photographs that prompted them. These
photographs were not chosen because they were the work of famous photographers;
but because they give Barthes a chance to explain the analytic difference between
‘the studium and the punctum’ in his theory of the photograph. The only well-
known photographers that Barthes uses for his analysis are Stieglitz and
Mapplethorpe, but he does not make heavy weather of this selection. Barthes would
like the focus of his analysis to be on the photographs rather than on the
photographers. This is not surprising in a semiologist who believed in the ‘death of
the author.’ If the author is dead, we can infer that the photographer must be dead as

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well.1 The invocation of death is not a morbid theme in Barthes; it is intrinsic to his
theory of the photograph. This book itself was an affective response to Barthes going
through the photographs of his dead mother in an attempt to find out who she really
was. In other words, it is a search for Barthes’s own sense of lost identity; it is also an
act of mourning. The existential import of this quest is what gives this book its sense
of rationale and purpose - so it is not reducible to a semiological inquiry into the
structure and function of photography.
THE ONTOLOGY OF THE IMAGE
The themes that usually resonate in Barthes’s texts include those of pleasure, love,
myths, signs, images, music, and the analytic differences between the work and the
text. All these themes resonate well in the context of photography as well, but they
are not invoked systematically here. Instead, Barthes means it when he says that
these are spontaneous reflections. Barthes puts down the thoughts that flicker in his
consciousness when he goes through the photographs that he considers to be
resonant; he then attempts to find out why that should be the case. When he
encounters photographs that do not make much of a difference to him, he again tries
to explain why that should be the case. But, before Barthes can separate these
photographs into two separate categories; he sets out the preliminary distinctions
that he has in mind. So, for instance, Barthes is haunted by the difference between
the ‘photographic image’ and the ‘cinematic image.’ We mustn’t forget that Barthes
belonged to an era before videos became endemic as a storehouse for the moving
image. So, for Barthes, the paradigm of the moving image is necessarily cinema.
What Barthes assumes in the case of both these media is an ‘ontological’ approach;
he is haunted by the question of what constitutes the ‘being’ of both stationary and
moving images. Barthes starts his quest by seeking to understand what photography
is in itself. This ontological quest later takes a phenomenological turn when he
begins to consider the differences between what photography is in itself and what it
comes across as to the semiologist. The gap between the ontological and
phenomenological dimensions of photography will be the locus for the emergence of
his unconscious in the act of mourning. It is Barthes’s desire as a semiologist who is
trying to grapple with the lure of the photographic image albeit in the context of
mourning then that is at stake in this wonderful book.2
1 Roland Barthes (1977).‘The Death of the Author,’ Image Music Text, translated by Stephen
Heath (London: Fontana press), pp. 142-148.
2 Roland Barthes (1977). ‘The Photographic Message,’ Image Music Text, translated by
Stephen Heath (London: Fontana press), pp. 15-31.

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THE LURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
There are two important aspects to the photographic message; the denotative and
the connotative. The former is a reproduction of the actual object or scene and is
referential in its orientation; the latter is the range of semantic associations that it
conjures up in the mind of the reader. The connotations of the photographic image
are not necessarily, as Barthes points out, obvious to the reader; that is why they
require semiological decoding or interpretation. That is also why the connotative
dimensions of the photographic image are related to a semiological theory of
reading.
Barthes also emphasizes the fact that the meaning of a photograph can be affected by
the text to which it is juxtaposed in the press or in the media. It is also important to
take note of how the subject ‘poses’ for the photograph and whether or not the
subject is surrounded by ‘objects’ that partake of a symbolic aspect. So, for instance,
writers are usually photographed next to a book-case in their offices or in a library to
accentuate what their profession actually involves. The lure of the photograph then
is a function of not only the subject that is featured therein, but also these additional
aspects which prop the subject. The reader is bound to be affected by these aspects in
the background without necessarily noticing them consciously unless he himself has
experience of composing photographs; and is therefore looking at the photograph
from the photographer’s point of view. Furthermore, Barthes differentiates between
a ‘photo’ and an ‘image.’ When we are responding to a photo; it is actually the image
that we are responding to; the former is the medium; the latter is the actual
representation. We have however got into the habit of using the word ‘photo’ when
what we are actually referring to is the ‘image.’ That is why it is important to
understand what Barthes means by ‘the rhetoric of the image.’3 Only then will it
3 See also Roland Barthes (1977). ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ Image Music Text, translated by
Stephen Heath (London: Fontana press), pp. 32-51.

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become possible to classify the different types of photography that Barthes terms
‘the aesthetic, the empirical, and the rhetorical.’ The lure of the photograph is also
implicated in the fact that it is a contingent encounter with the world which cannot
be replicated; it is this element of tuché that constitutes the Barthesian approach to
photography.
STUDIUM AND PUNCTUM
Where does Barthes get his theory of the tuché from? I think to make sense of what is
going on here, we must turn to Jacques Lacan’s invocation of the analytic distinction
between the ‘tuché and the automaton’ in his seminars.4 For Lacan, the automaton is
the symbolic Other and tuché is an ‘encounter with the real’ that resists signification.
It is an encounter that the subject will have to work-through with a lot of effort. The
main analytic distinction that Barthes introduces in this book between ‘the studium
and the punctum’ is analogous to the distinction between the symbolic and the real.
It is related to what Lacan refers to as ‘anamorphosis’ in his interpretation of why a
diagonal representation of the skull is featured in Hans Holbein’s painting ‘The
Ambassadors.’
In the absence of this skull which symbolizes death, ‘The Ambassadors’ would have
been just another Renaissance painting featuring a pair of noblemen displaying
themselves in all their finery. The presence of this diagonal skull is however only
visible from an angle; the viewer will have to tilt his head to the right to see it
clearly. There is consensus amongst art critics that the impact of this painting is a
function of being taken in unexpectedly by the skull; this element, if it appears in a
photograph, would correspond to what Barthes terms the ‘punctum.’ The symbolic
representation of the noblemen along with the usual indication of their nobility is the
studium. Barthes’s analysis of photographs turns on whether or not a photo that is
4 See Jacques Lacan (1979). ‘Tuché and Automaton,’ The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London:
Penguin Books), pp. 53-64.

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analysed using the semiological method can exhibit effectively the contrast between
these two categories; this difference however should not be conflated with the
conventional distinction in art theory and Gestalt psychology between ‘the
background and the figure’ in a painting. In the Holbein painting, the skull is not
merely an object that is more prominently placed in the foreground for our gaze; it is
a flat but ominous representation of Death itself. Such unexpected encounters were
what Barthes and Lacan termed encounters with the real (of death);5 a good instance
of such a representation in terms of the photographs that Barthes takes up for
analysis in this book is the contrast between a group of Nicaraguan soldiers and a
few nuns who are passing by (without being too concerned about the presence of the
soldiers). While the contrast is not as effective in this photograph compared to the
Holbein painting, this is the best example that Barthes can invoke to illustrate his
analytic distinction between the studium (which represents the soldiers) and the
punctum (which unexpectedly included the nuns in the same photograph).
CONCLUSION
This analytic distinction between the stadium and punctum is both a discovery and a
semiological norm for Roland Barthes. The photographs that affect him deeply then
are either structured like that already; or, he argues, ought to take that form in order to
make an impact. Photographs that lack this type of compositional structure will be
‘inert’ in his gaze; that is the most important insight that Barthes shares with his
readers. It is this insight that justifies putting these brief reflections in the form of a
book. The function of this insight, needless to say, is to prepare readers for the
contingency of all human existence that photography seeks to explore; it leads his
readers into the realm of the ‘flat death.’ That is why the flattening of the skull in
Holbein’s representation is significant to make sense of the ominous certainty of not
only his mother’s death but his awaited death as well. In Barthes’s own words: ‘the
only thought I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is
inscribed; between the two nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than
this irony; to speak of the nothing to say.’ What the semiology of the photograph
represents for Roland Barthes then is the function of mourning the inevitability of
death. It is therefore important to resist the temptation of taming the potential of
photography and making it a mere repository of illusions and ‘confront in it the
wakening of intractable reality.’
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN
5 See also Jacques Lacan (1979). ‘Anamorphosis,’ The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London:
Penguin Books), pp. 79-90.