What interests Benjamin is the potential excess contained in each photograph that evades the artistic intentions of the photographer. While paintings testify mainly (or exclusively) to the skill of the painter, a photograph testifies to something else or something more, “something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art.” This something else is the object “captured” by the camera and made immortal in the photograph. What is captured are “meaningful yet covert” details. Benjamin writes, “For it is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than the eye; ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to one informed by the unconscious.” This is because what we see in a photograph is never simply a duplication of the perspective or point of view of the photographer, no matter how deliberate or pain-staking his or her deliberations. The camera sees alongside the photographer, but it also sees in its own way. It has the ability to see more (and even, to see less) than the photographer. And the result is a work that can show us something unplanned, something unintended. Benjamin will coin the phrase “optical unconscious” to refer to the hidden reserves of meaning discoverable in every photographic document, regardless of who took the photograph, or for what reason. And this “optical unconscious” proliferates with advances in photographic technology. Benjamin: “The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms of the beholder.” (For more on this see Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” published in 1931.)
It is precisely this “shock effect” produced by the photograph on its beholder that is the subject of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). Barthes renames the “optical unconscious” the punctum: the punctum is not something we search out and discover using our skills as intrepid media analysts; it is something that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [the viewer]” – it is an accident “which pricks me” and me alone. The punctum is non-generalizable: what affects me, doesn’t necessarily affect you. This take on photography is a volte face for Barthes. Having made his reputation as a semiotician – analyzing the signs of culture to show his readers how they work to manufacture the beliefs and ideals of a given society – Barthes, in his final book, makes a very different claim about the photograph. Yes, there is still this element of the photograph that is open to semiotic analysis; he calls this the studium. Here we can talk about authorial intention, market manipulation, etc. Here too we can attempt to quantify the actual effects produced by an image on the consumer and so on. But there is also another level to the photographic image that evades this kind of ideological critique. This is the topic of Camera Lucida. What he wishes to communicate, most of all, is the “shock effect” of certain photographs; those elements of a photograph that speak to the (unconscious) desire of the beholder – the remnants of another time, of another place, left behind as deposits (as indices) on the medium of film and animated time and again by the solitary viewer. (In this case, Barthes himself, who writes his monograph while consumed by grief over the death of his beloved mother. He would die shortly after its publication.) Barthes: “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here” – here, in this room, looking at this photograph. “[T]he missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
(Note: A future post will address the significance of indexicality for Bazin’s film theory.)
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