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Camera Lucida

內容簡介

內容簡介 這是巴特生前最後一本書，《明室》之前，他遭遇喪母之痛，《明室》之後，隔年春天他車禍身亡，因此有評者認為此書中，寫作已成為一種服喪儀式，憂鬱無所不在地浸入書寫，吾人見巴特論攝影：攝影，沒有未來（這正是它的惆悵，它的憂鬱）。攝影，源生自悲愴。因此，《明室》不只是巴特細膩哲學語言下的「看圖說話」戲耍，更甚者，作為一個觀看的主體，他凝視每一張傷口，以胡塞爾及學生沙特的現象學方法語言，依照「存而不論」的三種意義：剝落、縮小研究範圍、還原。我們甚至可以說，巴特並非討論攝影（他自言將令專業攝影者失望不已），而是使得討論攝影的方式成為可能。巴特選擇《明室》作為書名，一是借詞強調攝影「毫無深度，過去曾在事物的明顯事實，此即攝影可怕之處。」二來則是故意顛倒一般之見，不以暗箱為名，提出似是而非的真理，這便是《明室》，純淨而深沈的攝影札記。"‘Roland Barthes' final book - less a critical essay than a suite of valedictory meditations - is his most beautiful, and most painful’ ObserverExamining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, these 'reflections on photography' begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind.

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內文 :

Excerpts from Camera
Lucida, Roland Barthes

KOEN WESSING:
NICARAGUA" 1979

"I understood at
once that this photograph's 'adventure' derived from the co-presence of two
elements... "

I was glancing through
an illustrated magazine. A photograph made me pause. Nothing very
extraordinary: the (photographic) banality of a rebellion in Nicaragua: a
ruined street, two helmeted soldiers on patrol; behind them, two nuns. Did this
photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for
me). I understood at once that its existence (its "adventure")
derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in
that they did not belong to the same world (no need to proceed to the point of
contrast): the soldiers and the nuns. I foresaw a structural rule (conforming
to my own observation), and I immediately tried to verify it by inspecting
other photographs by the same reporter (the Dutchman Koen Wessing): many of
them attracted me because they included this kind of duality which I had just
become aware of. Here a mother and daughter sob over the father's arrest
(Baudelaire: "the emphatic truth of gesture in the great circumstances of
life"), and this happens out in the countryside (where could they have
learned the news? for whom are these gestures?). Here, on a torn-up pavement, a
child's corpse under a white sheet; parents and friends stand around it,
desolate: a banal enough scene, unfortunately, but I noted certain
interferences: the corpse's one bare foot, the sheet carried by the weeping
mother (why this sheet?), a woman in the
background, probably a friend, holding a handkerchief to her nose. Here again,
in a bombed-out apartment, the huge eyes of two little boys, one's shirt raised
over his little belly (the excess of those eyes disturb the scene). And here,
finally, leaning against the wall of a house, three Sandinists, the lower part
of their faces covered by a rag (stench? secrecy? I have no idea, knowing
nothing of the realities of guerrilla warfare); one of them holds a gun that
rests on his thigh (I can see his nails); but his other hand is stretched out,
open, as if he were explaining and demonstrating something. My rule applied all
the more closely in that other pictures from the same reportage were less
interesting to me; they were fine shots, they expressed the dignity and horror
of rebellion, but in my eyes they bore no mark or sign: their homogeneity
remained cultural: they were "scenes," rather a Za Greuze, had it not
been for the harshness of the subject.

My rule was plausible
enough for me to try to name (as I would need to do) these two elements whose
co-presence established, it seemed, the particular interest I took in these
photographs. The first, obviously, is an extent, it has the extension of a
field, which I perceive quite familiarly as a consequence of my knowledge, my
culture; this field can be more or less stylized, more or less successful,
depending on the photographer's skill or luck, but it always refers to a
classical body of information: rebellion, Nicaragua, and all the signs of both:
wretched un-uniformed soldiers, ruined streets, corpses, grief, the sun, and
the heavy-lidded Indian eyes. Thousands of photographs consist of this field,
and in these photographs I can, of course, take a kind of general interest, one
that is even stirred sometimes, but in regard to them my emotion requires the
rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture. What I feel. about
these photographs derives from an average affect" almost from a certain training.
I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human
interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn't mean, at least not immediately,
"study," but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general,
enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs,
whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical
scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the
gestures, the settings, the actions. The second element will break (or
punctuate) the studium. This
time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness) , it is this
element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces
me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by
a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers
to the notion of punctuation, and becaus;e the photographs I am speaking of are
in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points;
precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element
which will disturb the studium
I shall therefore call punctum;
for punctum is also: sting,
speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises
me, is poignant to me) . Having thus distinguished two themes in Photography
(for in general the photographs I liked were constructed in the manner of a
classical sonata), I could occupy myself with one after the other.

Many photographs are,
alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my
eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have
no punctum in them: they please
or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest,
of inconsequential taste: I like / I don't like. The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it
mobilizes a half desire, a demi-volition; it is the same sort of vague,
slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments,
the books, the clothes one finds "all right." To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer's
intentions, to enter into harmony with [them].

KOEN WESSING: NICARAGUA, I979

“…the sheet carried by the weeping mother (why this
sheet?)..."

At the time (at the
beginning of this book) when I was inquiring into my attachment to certain
photographs, I thought I could distinguish a field of cultural interest (the studium) from that unexpected flash which sometimes
crosses this field and which I called the punctum*.

[*punctum: personal significance for a ‘reader’ unintended
by the ‘author’. GB]

I now know that there
exists another punctum (another
"stigmatum") than the "detail." This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is
Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation. In 1865, young
Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward.  Alexander Gardner photographed him in
his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is
the boy: that is the studium.
But the punctum is: he is
going to die.

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