Barthes’s writing on photography is richly focused on senses and perception: where is the photograph in the process of photography? He reflects in the reading that the photograph as a medium is not necessarily perceived; it is an intermediary, ie as Barthes says “no photography without something or someone” (pg. 6), which Barthes calls a “fatality”—which is a very interesting word to focus in on. As Susanna wrote, Barthes writes that the self never coincides with the imagery. I’d like to pair this point with Barthes’s comment about subtlety in photography and how the realization of subtlety is reliant on the hand of a master. In all these of these points—the “fatality” of invisibility, the metaphorical absentia of the subject, and the difficulty of subtlety—the process of photography is dissected, but each aspect of the process retains a sense of mysticism in a way. The simplicity and immediacy of perceiving photographs is deeply misleading in Barthes’s writing. The very process of perceiving a photographic subject—who may, like Barthes, have been trying to radiate an unreadable smile—makes immediate and invisible the process of how such a smile is captured “exactly” as-is. I think the danger lingering on the flip side of Barthes’s argument is the conviction that what you see is what there is to see or what you see or what you get. The obviousness of photography is a great threat to the depths of its meaning—for example, the sense that eyes have seen the Emperor, in Barthes’s example. But in that example, Barthes despairs that no one else can see the transitive sense of Napoleon. This danger of perceiving of photography as a flat record of self-evident “reality” is an emotive and imaginative failure in Barthes’s argument.