In light of myth: photography as truth in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wishing to access the referential nature of things, the later Roland Barthes turned to premodern modes of thinking that emphasise presence, exteriority, and certainty. This essay shows this turn by elaborating on the Platonic, mythical, and tragic subtexts of his Camera Lucida. The photographic pose – interpreted variously through tragic masks, sacred icons, or documentary transparency – offers a rich site to reflect on the objectivity of experience. Though its memories are subjective, photography’s vivid effect shares in the universality promised by myth, which is also an imagistic mode of experience. The tension between the studium (techne/rhetoric) and the punctum (wound/experience) leads Barthes to affirm the incontrovertible reality of the latter over the artificiality of the former. Additionally, photography’s temporality of the past functions as a confirmation of presence rather than absence: the no-more does not signify what is not there, but corroborates in its melancholy what once was. In short, the light of photography in Camera Lucida is not so much a technical device required by an artistic medium but the very light of truth that grounds the referentiality of existence.