... those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere. Roland Barthes, S/Z Artist and critic Victor Burgin uses the above quotation to open his essay Rereading Camera Lucida, critical examination of Roland Barthes's theoretical current throughout Camera Lucida: Reflections in Photography (1980), Image-Music-Text (1977), and Mythologies (1957). first time I read Camera Lucida I was on the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, Peru, which travels alongside the Urubamba River in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in the Andes. At that moment, I was interested in photography's role in objectifying ruin and objectifying (a) people. In my rereading with Burgin, I found myself not only questioning my role but also reconsidering the phenomenology of my interpretation. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As I watched others in the process, I lost all desire to capture any of the scenery around me. I'd had enough of the local women's persistent pressure: Foto, miss! Miss, foto. I did not want to pose with my family for cliche tourist photos, but it was impossible to disregard the occasion. As Barthes writes, did I care about the rules of composition of the photographic landscape, or, at the other end, about the Photograph as family rite? (1) like Barthes, I could not dismiss the intrinsic personal value of photography or retreat to simplistic sociological critique of tourist photography. Barthes says it best: Yet I persisted; another, louder voice urged me to dismiss such sociological commentary; looking at certain photographs, I wanted to be primitive, without culture. (2) At these words I paused. What did he mean by this? And was it appropriate? As I gazed out the train window, peasant children looked up from their work in the fields to wave as we passed them in floating flash. Barthes writes of subjective discomfort, being torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical, and the effort to dismiss systematic reduction of his critical language to particular discourse such as semiology, sociology, or psychoanalysis. (3) This burden is obligatory to the artist, but what of the discomfort of the human being objectified as observed subject? observed might convey something through gesture or posture, but his fated objecthood inevitably undermines his critical capacity. object is never the Operator or the Spectator. To Barthes, the experience of being photographed involves sensation of inauthenticity, characterized as a subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming specter. (4) By this account, the folk-dressed natives are corpses of their true beings while, to the tourist, they embody the original, unadulterated, and primitive. Their colorful dress, weathered skin, and dark hair beg objectification, but this palpability is beyond superficial. It is super-authentic. Their appearance is never for itself but for authenticity's sake. Dressed for admiration like dolls in cabinet, they become lifeless--or as Barthes suggests in consideration of photography's history, they become museum objects. (5) Their objectification by the tourist's photograph is, if not micro-death, an artfully subtle life-removal. Burgin intentionally rereads Barthes intertextually to delineate the structural motifs throughout his texts. (6) Barthes's early structuralism unequivocally reveals the binary distinction (in photography and literature) of denotation and connotation--the literal and the symbolic meanings. In his essays The Photographic Message (1961) and Rhetoric of the Image (1964) Barthes demonstrates the distinct but operationally related roles of the signifier. Their relationship, he contends, is paradoxical insofar as the literal image exist on its own and thus cannot be substantial but only relational. …