Roland Barthes and the snapshot

Abstract

In 1980, a few months after completing the manuscript for his semmal study La Chombre Claire: Note sur la photographie (translated into English as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography), the French philosopher Roland Barthes stepped off a Parisian street comer and was killed by a passing laundry van. He was sixty-five at the time, hardly an old man, but any reader of Camera Lucida would have to conclude that ‘untimely’ is not a word as straightforwardly applied to this fatality as it might have been to that of another author; for, disconcertingly, Barthes's last statement on the photographic medium is rife with thoughts about death and mortality — his own, and that of those he loved. It is in tact a theory of death offered in the guise of a critical analysis, one professedly aroused by the deeply felt loss of his mother just prior to its formulation, but moreover inscribed with meditations on the phenomenology of the writer's own existence and implied demise. At the emotional centre of this disquisition lies a single object: a photograph of his mother when still a child that Barthes finds in her things after her funeral. Whether presentiment, self-destruction, or mere unhappy accident relate the two circumstances, Camera Lucida has the uncanny effect of rendering its author's actual death a somewhat prosaic confirmation of his theoretical one, while at the same time elevating this single hermetic and rather unremarkable family document to the posthumous status of cultural icon. Barthes's study is worthy of reexamination in the present context not only because of its stature as the most sustained and thoughtful contemplation of a vernacular photograph extant in the literature — drawing response from critics as diverse as Victor Burgin, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jacques Derrida, and Susan Sontag — but also because, in demonstrating his impassioned reading of this personal memento, the author elaborated a hermeneutic model that opens up possibilities for analysis of a much greater range of non-art objects and practices than has heretofore been the province of traditional photographic history. In this model the snapshot assumes a gravity all the more considerable for its indeterminacy and lack of intention, a key not only to Barthes's individual aesthetic but also to the poststructuralist position into which his work metamorphosed over time.