Roland Barthes was one of the most outstanding thinkers of the twentieth century, for sure, but his ideas about photography as a medium are, to say the least, open to criticism. The French philosopher and semiologist wrote the famous article Rhetoric of the Image in 1964. His analysis is spotless, except that, in our opinion, his object of study was not photography in general, but, at best, advertising photography. Indeed, advertising photography must have a “message”, in general, a clear and simple message, the goal being that customers buy a product. Such is the case of the Panzani pasta packet, which Barthes used as a model to explain what he means by the rhetoric of the image.
Photography is not language
But photography is not only advertising photography, and probably even advertising photography cannot be reduced to just language. An image is worth more than 1000 words says the popular refrain, and with good reason. The visual evokes space, touch, smell, and sensitive impression has a depth and latitude of interpretation beyond the possibilities of language. In the sensitive, in the visual, there are many things that cannot be said with words.
This is not the first time that Barthes reduced photography to its minimal expression: he would do so, and in a more radical way, in his Camera Lucida of 1980. In this essay, by simplifying, Barthes suggests that photography is a trace of the “real”, which is also (very) false. Photography, at best, can be seen as the trace of visual information from the real world, recorded according to a specific device, which implies the “central perspective” (we do not see the world according to the central perspective…). It is sometimes in black and white, and when it is in color, these colors are not the real colors at the time of capture for the 99.9% of photos circulating on the web. The real, as we see it, depends on the totality of our senses and can never be “captured” by a technical device.
A message without code
Also, in the Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes says his famous phrase “photography is a message without code”. We cannot, unfortunately once again, agree with Roland. Indeed, sometimes reading an art photograph requires prior knowledge: images work in series and not alone, and their interpretation depends on how they position themselves in relation to a history of images, often using codified elements. One cannot, for example, understand important elements of Andreas Gursky’s photography, Rhine II (1999), without knowing the work of this artist, without knowing anything about the New Objectivity in Germany, without having in mind the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher…. and a long etc. It is information that acts as a code, and yes, it helps to understand important aspects of the work of art photographers.
Photography can act as a symbol, and may need a code to be better read, yes, but not only. There are MULTIPLE TYPES OF WAY OF FUNCTIONING for each image, and there is a completely sensitive functioning mode, where the photograph is not a symbol: it is a window, or it can simply be an object.
Barthes has real value as a creator of extremes of thought in photography. Everything he has said about photography, strictly speaking, is false, but it serves to think: like the idea of emptiness, or the idea of infinity.