Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Part Two.
He's wearing a suit again, I don't know why he's wearing a suit, he doesn't usually dress like that
There is a a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently. (64) > cf. Adam Sandler’s character in Punch Drunk Love
Existence as a historiographic quantum state
In reading something related to On Kawara and the historicising function of the textual statement of a date, I had a notion that from historiographic perspective, a person’s existence might be said to occur within a kind of quantum state in which until it’s been observed recorded historicised it can’t be said, with certainty, to have existed // also cf. uncertainty principle
Thus the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division. History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it — and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of history. (65)
I WAS HERE
It was as if I were seeking the nature of a verb which had no infinitive, only tense and mode. (76)
The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed. (82)
[The photograph ...] is without future (this is its pathos, its melancholy. [...] I am alone with it, in front of it. The circle is closed, there is no escape. I suffer, motionless. Cruel, sterile deficiency: I cannot transform my grief, I cannot let my gaze drift; no culture will help me utter this suffering which I experience entirely on the level of the image's finitude [...] the Photograph — my Photograph — is without culture: it is painful, nothing in it can transform grief into mourning. (90)
★ THAT-HAS-BEEN
I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality, and of the past.
[... But in] the daily flood of photographs, in the thousand forms of interest they seem to provoke, it may be that the noeme "That-has-been" is not repressed (a noeme cannot be repressed) but experienced with indifference, as a feature which goes without saying. (76-7)
A resistance to believing in the past
Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of myth. The Photograph, for the first time, puts an end to this resistance: henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as cerram as what we touch. (87-8)
But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically. (93)
I am the reference of every photograph in each of which, my own death is contained
There is no shared, universal view of any photograph; each viewing opens up or occurs within unique pre- and post-histories. (Into every photograph "I project a troubling being, that of the lineage of which I am the final term (98)).
The date belongs to the photograph: not because it denotes a style (this does not concern me), but because it makes me lift my head. [...] I am the reference of every photograph. (84)
The only "thought" I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony: to speak of the "nothing to say." (93)
I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. (96)
There is no need to represent a body in order for me to experience this vertigo of time defeated. (96-7)
It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to the excited world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside of any generality. (97)
“All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions”
No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. The noeme of language is perhaps this impotence, or, to put it positively: language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath (85-7)
(Mélisande does not conceal, but she does not speak. Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see.) (100)
In the image, as Sartre says, the object yields itself wholly, and our vision of it is certain — contrary to the text or to other perceptions which give me the object in a vague, arguable manner, and therefore incite me to suspicions as to what I think I am seeing. (106)