Touching photographs: Roland Barthes's "mistaken" identification

Representations

Volumn 80, Issue , 2002, Pages 99-118

  Olin, Margaret ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34249358259     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2002.80.1.99     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. I refer to a widespread position. It has been critiqued many times, however, for example long ago by Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, in "Photography, Vision, and Representation," Critical Inquiry 2 (1975): 143-69
2. and as recently as William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
3. An important example of the growing literature on identification is Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York, 1975)
4. Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris, 1980)
5. translated as Camera Lucida: Notes on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981)
6. I will cite the English translation, sometimes amended (henceforth abbreviated CL, page references to the French edition immediately following those of the U.S. edition). A good deal has been written about Barthes's interest in photography. Besides the sources mentioned below, see especially, Jean Delord, Roland Barthes et la photographie (Paris, 1981)
7. Nancy M. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition, in Perspective (Gainesville, Fla., 1997)
8. and the essays in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia, Pa., 1997)
9. In two excellent essays, Johnnie Gratton has explored the staging of Barthes's individuality in Camera Lucida. Johnnie Gratton, "The Subject of Enunciation in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida," in Diana Knight, ed., Critical Essays on Roland Barthes (New York, 2000), 266-78
10. and Johnnie Gratton, "Text, Image, Reference in Roland Barthes's La Chambre Claire," Modern Language Review 91 (1996): 355-64. I will place Barthes's name in quotation marks when I believe the reader is in danger of taking the narrator of Camera Lucida - unproblematically - for the writer Roland Barthes
11. Most of them were originally published primarily in the journal Les lettres nouvelles, beginning in 1953. They were collected in Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, 1957). A smaller number were translated in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972)
12. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964), in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1985), 21-40
13. Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," 34, original emphasis
14. I use C. S. Peirce's terms because they are used more consistently in art historical analysis, even though Peirce's argument is actually thereby distorted. See C. S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York, 1955), 98-119
15. Michael Leja, "Peirce, Visuality and Art," Representations 72 (2000): 97-122
16. Barthes also uses the terms metaphor and metonymy to mean roughly what is designated by the terms icon and index. For an example of the use of Peirce, see Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 196-219
17. More recently, Carol Armstrong described the photograph as "first and foremost an indexical sign - that is, an image that is chemically and optically caused by the things in the world to which it refers"; Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1975 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 2
18. CL, 87/135
19. CL, 76/120, original emphasis
20. CL, 81/126-27
21. CL, 80-81/126. On the medieval theory of visual rays, which involved the controversy between intromission (Barthes's assumption) and extramission, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), 61-85
22. Kenneth Scott Calhoon also effectively reveals the haptic rhetoric in Camera Lucida; Kenneth Scott Calhoon, "Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography," Modern Language Notes 113, no. 3 (1998): 612-34, esp. 612-18
23. CL, 77/120-21. In the French edition, this essence is referred to, in Latin, as the "interfuit," and in French, as the "Ça-a- été." I plan to develop the memorial character in the beholding of images further, in an expansion of the present essay
24. CL, 26/48
25. CL, 26/49
26. James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson, Camille Billops, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 1978)
27. Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. Sarah Wykes (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 233
28. CL, 43/73
29. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Face and Voice of Blackness," in Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940 (San Francisco, 1990), xxix-xlvi
30. and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," Representations 24 (1988): 129-55
31. See also Melville J. Herskovits, "The Negro's Americanism," in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; reprint, New York, 1969), 353-60; and other essays in this important collection of the movement
32. Roger C. Birt, "A Life in American Photography;" in Van Der Zee: Photographer, 1886-1983, ed. Deborah Willis-Braithwaite (New York, 1998), 46-48
33. Barthes lists his photographic sources in the French edition only. Barthes, La chambre claire, 187
34. [Robert Delpire?], in Le nouvel observateur, Special Photo 2, ed. Robert Delpire (1977), 19
35. Barthes uses the concept of an "Imaginaire" (translated "image repertoire" in CL, 11/ 25) and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes / par Roland Barthes (1975), 2d ed. (Paris, 1995), 98-99
36. In the English translation "imaginaire" is rendered "image system"; Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977), 105
37. Hereafter the U.S. edition of this work will be cited, with references to the French edition immediately following. The concept echoes ideas in Jean-Paul Sartre, L'imaginaire: psychologie-phénoménologique de l'imagination (Paris, 1940)
38. translated as The Psychology of Imagination (New York, 1948)
39. Barthes dedicates La chambre claire "In Homage To L'Imaginaire by Jean-Paul Sartre."
40. The garb of "A Prophet" in figure 4 would most likely have belonged to the sitter. See the caption for this photograph in Willis-Braithwaite, Van Der Zee, 86. I would like to thank Camara Holloway for kindly providing me with information on this and other aspects of African-American photographers
41. For example, Roland Barthes, "Bichon and the Blacks," in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1979), 35-38. The essay appeared in the original French edition Mythologies
42. CL, 43/73-74, original emphasis
43. CL, 53/87, italics in the English translation only
44. CL, 53/87-88
45. Derek Attridge writes, in a footnote, "It is Barthes who identifies the necklace as a 'slender ribbon of braided gold': one cannot see this in the reproduction, where it looks white and rather thick - and identical to the other necklace in the picture, from which no punctum shoots. This discrepancy is of no account, however; even if we did see what Barthes describes, we would remain impervious to the punctum's laceration"; Attridge, "Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilities of Commentary," in Rabaté, Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, 88 n. 4. Diane Knight refers to "the supposed retrospective punctum of her necklace"; Knight, Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (Oxford, 1997), 263
46. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), trans. James Strachey (London, 1953), 277-309
47. The "camera lucida" is contrasted to the "camera obscura" in chapter 44 of CL, 106/164
48. Art Spiegelman, "Mein Kampf (My Struggle)," in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 100
49. CL, 53/88, translation slightly revised
50. The French author Georges Perec records a subjective mistake concerning a family-photograph in a novel originally published in 1975. His narrator records his own mistake, however. Barthes, perhaps intentionally, allows the reader to find his narrator's mistake; Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellow (Boston, 1988), 27 and 33 n. 1. I am grateful to my student Timothy Straveler for the reference to Perec
51. CL, 96/148
52. Walter Benjamin, "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie" (1931), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 2, bk. 1 (Frankfurt, 1977), 375; translated as "A Short History of Photography," trans
53. P. Patton, in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn., 1980), 206
54. Walter Benjamin, "Les analphabetes de l'avenir," Le nouvel observateur, Special Photo 2 (1977), 16
55. Le nouvel observateur, Special Photo 2 (1977), 19
56. Carol Armstrong, "From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the 'Lady Amateur,'" October 91 (2000): 106
57. and Ralph Sarkonak, "Roland Barthes and the Spectre of Photography" L'esprit créateur 22 (1982): 56-57
58. Liliane Weissberg assumes that "The Stock" is "open to speculation: it may represent the author's family and it may not"; Weissberg, "Circulating Images: Notes on the Photographic Exchange," in Rabaté, Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, 113
59. Knight raises the issue in Barthes and Utopia, 265-66. See, for an example of a response, the rather hesitant reference to Knight's "suggestion" in Attridge, "Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning," 86 and 89 n. 9. It never seriously occurred to me that there really was a Winter Garden Photograph, but, like Knight, I have had mixed success convincing others
60. Diana Knight refers to Edgar Allen Poe in relation to the Winter Garden Photograph, Barthes and Utopia, 266
61. Barthes used the Poe story as a parable relating to the concealment of meaning; Daniel Ferrer, "Genetic Criticism in the Wake of Barthes," in Rabaté, Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, 225
62. CL, 105/163-64, translation slightly amended
63. Sartre, Psychology of Imagination, 104
64. Margaret Iversen brings out Lacanian elements in Barthes, including that of the important relation to Lacan's discussion of the gaze; Margaret Iversen, "What is a photograph?" Art History 17 (1994): 450-63
65. See also Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 65-119
66. CL, 72/112
67. Knight, Barthes and Utopia, 264
68. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 14/20
69. Although to some in the audiences to which I have spoken it has mattered a lot
70. CL, 57/90-91
71. Calvet, Roland Barthes, 43
72. This speculation is my response to a series of astute observations on the photographs by Sally Stein
73. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York, 1985), 357.62. CL, 3/13
74. CL, 3/13