Roland Barthes "Extracts from Camera Lucida"
Roland Barthes “Extracts From Camera Lucida”
In this essay Barthes explores his relationship to being photographed and what a photograph represents about a person. This Essay was interesting and very personal. It was hard for me to follow all of his ideas but I liked some of them. I appreciated the anecdotes on his feelings about being seen by a camera (5), posing, wanting to appear “Noble” and hoping the camera captures that look. I liked his observance that you become an object, “It is my political right to be a subject that I must protect.” (5) He also goes into an interesting argument claiming that photography kills you, and death is what the camera does. The photograph is an historic and ethnographic reference. When the picture is taken tells you a lot about the story of the people, I liked how he describes this in the way the people dressed in William Klein’s photograph “Mayday, 1959.” He learned about style in the early 20th century from the way the men kept their fingernails long. I like how Barthes conclusion finnaly lead him to find a soul in a photograph, his mother. He explores all aspects of representation within a photograph and does not say, “This is me” when looking at a picture. Photos show a unique aspect of a person and can tell you something about the photographed person even if you can’t see them in the present moment.
Margaritte Knezek
