I was focused in my reading in the underpinnings in both Sontag and Barthes’ writing about photography’s relationship with reality—or at least, our perception or experience of reality. Barthes speaks from a corner drenched in phenomenology, where Sontag is far more formal and technical as a critic. However, both dig at the underlying sense that the photo retains a greater claim on the subject’s being than the subject itself, in varying senses.

One subject that Sontag discusses is experience—say, a tourist on vacation. The report of the image makes the experience of the trip real—preserves and reifies it, and, as Sontag observes/warns, supplants the actual doing of the trip by simple virtue of outlasting it, but being more permanent and more easily referenced than memory itself. She opens her argument with the example of Plato’s cave: a realm where images were understood to be reality. In her conception, “images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic images, and the scope of that authority stems from the properties peculiar to images taken by cameras” (153).

Barthes approaches the same point with his more mystical and self-centered philosophy: his experience of being photographed becomes his baseline for the philosophical argument he makes that the Photograph is a spectral borderland that could easily embody Death, but also that it ferments a sense of adventure (which would be an argument familiar to film critics of early documentaries in which a sense of being there was so central to the experience of the film). Barthes writes, The Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object…I am truly become a specter” (14). In Barthes’ estimation, the Photograph’s claim on reality is intertwined with his ideas of his own consciousness: “I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. The transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice” (10-11). Sontag states far more plainly: “photography’s progress has made ever more literal the senses in which a photograph gives control over the thing photographed” (157). Again, the thing photographed could well be an experience, reified to an image.

Barthes and Sontag both work with the slippery moment of thingness involved in photography: the instant of preservation and representation that has such an authoritative hold on reality for the viewer. Sontag has a number of beautiful extrapolations on this theme, including a favorite of mine where she draws on Balzac’s “ghostly” theory (that would get along very well with Barthes’ “spectral” one) to describe any person as an “aggregate of appearances” (159). But most explicitly, she drives home this reality-image relationship with a technical-level statement: “The mechanical genesis of these images, and the literalness of the powers they confer, amounts to a new relationship between image and reality” (158). This is, in effect, the image-world of the chapter’s title: the supplanting of an image’s authority over experience, the image’s ability to lay greater claim to reality than experienced “reality” itself.

Neither Sontag or Barthes are being necessarily alarmist; both seem fascinated by the authority and power of an image, even eager to perceive the range of photography’s power. Barthes’ mention of feeling inauthentic in photographs of himself, though, is telling. What is in the photograph, after all? It isn’t Barthes, but it is the only way a reader like me will ever physically encounter him. In all effect, the image of the man has become the reality.

In terms of title sequences, I am a huge fan of how the title cards for The Green Knight (2021) create a sense of space and of transformation from instant to instant. Unfortunately, they are also unique in that they are scattered throughout the film, and I could only find a brief moment of them in this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF3c0rIJujA&t=10s

You can get a sense of their stylization via the onscreen text in this video however:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI189R6JyYI