Roland Barthes -- Camera Lucida

I'd like to use photography to record memories. Photography can help me to put memorable moments pause, and permanent preservation. I use photography to make art works, the image of those outputs are very honest expression and record my thoughts, my life narrative. I think photography is not just a technology, it is evidence that people existed and portrayal. The first person who gave me the most important theoretical basis is derived from Roland Gérard Bathes.

Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915–26 March1980). He was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism,semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. He was the son of naval officer Louis Barthes, who was killed in a battle in the North Sea before his son was one year old. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life.

My research from him is his book -- Camera Lucida. Camera Luida is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").

In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum:studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

For Barthes, every photograph, rather than being a representation, is an expression of loss. The photograph, like all art which precedes it, attempts to eternalize its subject, to imbue it with life-forever, to blend the beautiful with the infinite; but it fails, it reminds us only of mortality (death is the mother of beauty). Try though it may, and despite its resemblance to life, the photo can never extend a life which is lost, or a life which is passing.

Here was an opportunity to think for a moment about Barthes’ book anew (a book which has always perplexed me for its narrow reading of photography). Halfway through Camera Lucida, Barthes shifts his discussion from public photographs (journalism, advertisements and the like) to private photographs:

Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs. I had no hope of “finding” her, I expected nothing from these “photographs of a being thinking of him or her” (Proust). I had acknowledged that fatality, one of the most agonizing features of mourning, which decreed that however often I might consult such images, I could never recall her features (summon them up as a totality)….I could not even say that I loved [these photographs]: I was not sitting down to contemplate them, I was not engulfing myself in them. I was sorting them, but none seemed to me really “right”: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face. If I were ever to show them to friends I could doubt that these photographs would speak.

It has always seemed to me that Barthes expected too much from these photographs of his mother. Barthes, who takes an absolutist position here, decides that photography is inadequate to the task of resurrecting his mother’s “being.” Nevertheless, as he looks at photograph after photograph he does admit to “gradually moving back in time with her”: he hears again the sound of the lid of an ivory powder box and he can recall “the rumpled softness of her crêpe de Chine and the perfume of her rice powder.”But then, suddenly, he turns up a photograph that provides “the truth of the face I had loved,” thus redeeming the promise of photography.

So I think the photos to its subjects with confirmed resistance . Like my personal work , the memories of a particular swing shot into the video to record it had meaning for me and after contact with it . A person or an article is taken down, it proved it once existed in this world . In many cases, photographs are used as evidence of the real world exists , it shows the people and things definitely existed.

But I think the photos of the energy is used to demonstrate not only the memories are so thin and simple. They show someone or something in a moment of history ever existed , is exactly this moment must inevitably disappear. The existence of photo and video viewing images can prompt people had noticed the characteristics of the time will not repeat , someone or something to remind people in the state can no longer have a specific time and space , or someone / thing will never again re- now , as they have in the past or disappeared, they have become only the image remains in this world evidence. Also became the basis for our memories.

When we watch a photographic works when it is natural to think about the fate of images and stories of the characters or in kind , to imagine the state when filming . Roland Barthes saw his mother at age 5 and older brother of a photo, can not help but imagine the photographer at that time she said , " a little before the station , looking to get you ."

Photos recording originally existed to prove someone or something , but the result has led to viewing images of these people and things that people have not consciousness. I can think of a typical example of this is the time when the old man look younger photos, will not repeat youthful memories ever . Therefore, these become our figurative, can touch memories through photographs or video output image.

Take a picture or record a video at the same time has also created a new world and time and space . Appearing in the image in the world exists in another time and space, its eternal rest forever exist only in areas where memories . However photographic artistry on the performance here , I think it is always good photography can pull us out of the real life photography on display temporarily enter another world.