Roland barthes, camera lucida The most important book about photography ever written

by aestheticsofphotography

In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes tries to understand if photography has “its own genius”, if there is a particular feature that characterizes it.    

for Barthes: The operator is the photographer himself. The spectator is the one who looks at the photo. The spectrum is the one that is photographed, the subject.

When analyzing a photo of soldiers and nuns in Nicaragua, Barthes realizes that there are two elements that makes him appreciate this or that photograph.

“I understood at once that this photograph’s ‘adventure’ derived from the co-presence of two elements… “  These elements are: The STUDIUM and The PUNCTUM 

The interest in a photo that has only the studium comes from a moral and political culture, it is an average affect, a general investment only. 

The punctum, the most important in a photograph (when it exists), breaks the studium from the scene like an arrow.  

The punctum is a detail, a supplement that can fill the whole photo with meaning: it has a force of expansion.  

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