Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida

Courtesy MIT Press

Cover, "Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's 'Camera Lucida,'" ed. Geoffrey Batchen

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Published shortly before his premature death, in 1980, Roland Barthes’s meditation on vernacular photography, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie — more widely known as Camera Lucida — continues to have an ambivalent, if not fractious, relationship with the visual arts. A memorial of sorts to his recently deceased mother, Henriette, Barthes’s slim volume investigates the play of meaning in a singular photograph taken of her in 1898. Barthes eschews the conventions of photography and camera technique to focus on the "pure" experience of the photograph itself. In the process, his voice becomes by turns emotional and unpredictable, as if the author were lost in mournful reveries on his mother’s death. Expounding on his private grief, he claims that the photograph is a "microversion of death — Death in person. Death is the eidos of that photograph." The image, he continues, is "the return of the dead." With its relentless quest for a necromantic language, rejecting the absolutes of both scholastic criticism and unreflective poesy, Camera Lucida represented a vernacular zenith for Barthes that both fascinated and repelled his readers.

Photography Degree Zero, edited by the CUNY professor Geoffrey Batchen, assembles 13 critical essays written over the past 30 years and across various academic disciplines. The result is a colloquium of sorts on Barthes’s most-often-cited and controversial text. Purposely skewed toward British and American scholarship, Batchen’s selections highlight not only Barthes’s influence on aesthetics and criticism but also his "translatability" into the contemporaneous, but often nonsynchronous, orbits of the U.S. and U.K. academy. Beginning with Victor Burgin’s 1982 critique "Rereading Camera Lucida," Batchen endeavors to trace the book’s idée fixe back to its "zero degree," contextualizing and categorizing Barthes’s oeuvre according to its psychoanalytical, phenomenological, and semiological spin. For Burgin, the lesson is that no public — or, by implication, nonscholastic — reader of Camera Lucida can understand its idiom without first absorbing a century of European theory. Jane Gallop’s "The Pleasure of the Phototext," written in 1985, is equally invested in "solving" the mystery of Camera Lucida, in this case by following the clues in Barthes’s 1973 Le plaisir du texte and applying that volume’s use of the term jouissance ("ecstasy") to the later book’s mysterious punctum, thereby creating a psychoanalytic reading.

Fortunately, the labored lectures on Freud and Lacan are kept to a minimum in the second half of the collection, which is dominated by critiques by visual-art and cultural theorists. Michael Fried’s "Barthes’s Punctum," written in 2005, reinterprets the French author’s most frequently cited neologism as belonging to his own category of "antitheatrical critical thought," which he connects to Diderot’s distinction between seeing and being shown. Also included are two essays, by James Elkins and Rosalind Krauss, written in direct response to Fried’s reading of punctum. The former emphasizes the hybrid role of phenomenology and technology in defining the term, while the latter situates it in the tradition of Barthes’s "third meaning," an escape from what he called "the fascism of language."

Special mention must be given to Carol Mavor’s "Black and Blue: The Shadows of Camera Lucida" (1980), an extraordinary first-person meditation on Barthes’s role in the as-yet-unexplored field of color theory. Beginning with an indictment of Camera Lucida’s "ô négresse nourricière" ("solacing Mammy"), Mavor explores, through the works of Marcel Proust, Joseph Cornell, and Toni Morrison, the evolution of blackness as an index of race, mystery, and fetishism and of blueness as an index of sexuality, nostalgia, and affect. She reinterprets Barthes’s rejection of semiotic and racial polarities through his resistance to the paradigmatic monochrome photograph. The stories of Camera Lucida are "not black-and-white," claims Mavor, but rather a "third language of black and blue."