Life, Representation, and Truth

There are several questions which Camera Lucida raises for me. Here are two ...

1. Barthes talks about life and death and the subject’s relationship to these two states as bestowed upon him by the photograph. He seems to say that the photograph bestows life upon the subject, makes him immortal, but also emphasizes the fact that he is going to die or is already dead. I am having trouble reconciling both points into one coherent view.

2. “Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents” (102). This is confusing because it follows a list of features which Barthes says are characteristic of the people



The concept of truth in photography that Barthes discusses all throughout CL is really interesting, and I agree with it. Everything that is shown in a photograph actually happened. I kept trying to think of instances that would disprove this very basic tenet of Barthes’s philosophy but I could not. Professor Chun brought up the concept of the fulgurator n lecture, but even so, the instance with the cross on Obama’s podium actually happened and there is no denying it, even if the cross was not material. And once we photoshop an image, it is no longer a photograph, but an instance of art, like a painting. It is something beyond capturing the essence of a subject, alters what has been, and therefore steps over the boundary of being photography.