Photography forces us to believe in the past in all of its incongruities.
The interplay between exterior and interior forms our relationship with photography as well-which “divides the history of the world,” says Barthes. His conclusion is that because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it. He’s a sensualist, a memoirist, in the best of ways his thought, as complex as it is in all of its theorizing and decodings, always traipses through life, the drifts of memory.īarthes wrote Camera Lucida in homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, in which Sartre discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness. It seems as if he touches each word with his fingertips.
Each photograph tells the smallest part of a much bigger story.Īnd then I love Barthes, who writes more like a poet than a philosopher. Each photograph resides in a prism: the intent of a pose, the person caught unawares, the gaze trapped in time. I suppose I’m drawn to commentary of photography because photographs provide such a moment for existential reflection-such an everlasting moment (a paradoxical phrase that in itself defines photography’s poignancy). Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Mind’s Eye, and now Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.
I have a love affair with books on photography.
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