Fabien Arribert-Narce, “Roland Barthes’s Photobiographies” (2009): Summary

In “Roland Barthes’s Photobiographies: Towards an ‘Exemption from Meaning’”, published in 2009 in the Monash University journal Colloquy: Text Theory Critique (no. 18), Fabien Arribert-Narce follows a thread that runs through Barthes’s late work: the use of photographs to write about one’s own life. The essay is a clear guide to the link between Barthes’s theory of photography and his experiments with autobiography.

From semiology to the photobiography

Arribert-Narce first recalls the early Barthes. In Mythologies (1957), “The Photographic Message” (1961) and “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), photography is a double object: a message without a code, which seems to deliver the real directly, and a message full of cultural connotations that can be read like a text. Barthes never abandons this double view, but its emphasis shifts with the context. When the photographs are personal – family pictures, snapshots of himself as a child – Barthes adopts what Arribert-Narce calls a “realist” attitude, attentive to the emotional force of the image rather than to its codes.

A “polygraphy” of texts and images

The heart of the essay is Barthes’s photobiographical project, visible in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and in Camera Lucida (1980). Arribert-Narce describes it as a “polygraphy”: a mix of texts, photographs, drawings and other graphic objects held together by writing. In this mix, the usual hierarchy between text and image collapses. What matters instead is the distinction between two levels of reception that Barthes formulated in Camera Lucida: the studium, the general and cultural interest a picture holds, and the punctum, the detail that “pricks” a particular viewer.

An “exemption from meaning”

For Barthes, Arribert-Narce argues, the best access to autobiographical material is emotional rather than narrative. The photographs of his childhood are not illustrations of a life story; they are fragments that resist interpretation. Barthes dreamed of an “exemption from meaning” – a way of showing a life without turning it into a coherent, signifying narrative. The amateur, “one who loves and loves again”, is his model, not the hero or the professional author.

This leads to the essay’s main claim: although Barthes’s photobiography never took shape as a single book, it renews the theory of autobiography. Against Philippe Lejeune and others, it shows that autobiography need not be a genre of linear narrative, unity and signification. It can be discontinuous, visual and affective.

Why read it

It connects Barthes’s semiology of the 1960s with the more personal writing of Camera Lucida, which is often read in isolation.
It gives a precise account of the studium and the punctum as tools for reading personal photographs.
It is useful for anyone working on photography and memory, family albums or autobiographical photobooks.

Context

The essay belongs to a wider rediscovery of Barthes’s late, personal writing, which scholars have read alongside his lectures at the Collège de France. It also echoes a broader interest in “photobiography”, the use of photographs in autobiographical books by writers such as W. G. Sebald or Annie Ernaux. Arribert-Narce later developed this line of research in a book on photobiography in French literature.

Reference

Fabien Arribert-Narce, “Roland Barthes’s Photobiographies: Towards an ‘Exemption from Meaning’”, Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, no. 18, Monash University, 2009. The essay is published by the journal; consult it through the Monash University Colloquy archive or a university library.