Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Part One.
2 The Photograph Unclassifiable
By nature, the Photograph [...] has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. (5)
5 He Who is Photographed
Photography transformed subject into object (13)
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture. [... The] Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject. (13-14)
7 Photography as Adventure
I quote Sartre: "Newspaper photographs can very well 'say nothing to me.' In other words, I look at them without assuming a posture of existence. Though the persons whose photograph I see are certainly present in the photograph, they are so without existential posture, like the Knight and Death present in Durer's engraving, but without my positing them. Moreover, cases occur where the photograph leaves me so indifferent that I do not even bother to see it 'as an image.' The photograph is vaguely constituted as an object, and the persons who figure there are certainly constituted as persons, but only because of their resemblance to human beings, without any special· intentionality. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either."
17 The Unary Photograph
News photographs are very often unary (the unary photograph is not necessarily tranquil). In these images no punctum: a certain shock — the literal can traumatise — but no disturbance; the photograph can ‘shout’, not wound. These journalistic photographs are received (all at once), perceived. I glance through them, I don't recall them, no detail [...] ever interrupts my reading”. (41)
22 After-the-Fact and Silence
“The necessary condition for an image is sight," Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” (53)
Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). (55)
23 Blind Field
Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what l add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there. (55)