Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida

I was pretty confused when reading Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” it read very much like a stream of consciousness to me, where Barthes discusses his views on photography: how he discovered photography, how he feels when he photograph is taken, how he evaluates or analyzes a photograph, and his commentary on several photographs. It was interesting how he described getting his photograph taken as death — I don’t particularly like getting my picture taken either, but I certainly would not go as far in that comparison. I was very drawn to part 4, where he describes that a photograph can be the object of three practices: to do, to undergo, and to look (where the three roles are the Operator, the Spectator, and the Spectrum. This section was interesting because I’m sure we have all taken on each of the three roles at some point, likely frequently. This made me think about the distinction between these three roles, specifically in the sense of how we interact with the photograph based on each role. For example, if you’re the photographer, you’re probably thinking about the best way to capture the moment and the composition scene; if you’re the subject, you are thinking about how to pose; and if you’re the observer, you are probably analyzing and judging the piece.

Jochen Gerz

The relationship between image and text is something we see and experience everywhere, all the time, such as in advertisements, books, instruction manuals, social media posts, and so much more. In this case, I had trouble making sense of a lot of Jochen Gerz’s text and image pairings. In general, the eye is drawn to the image first, then reads the text often for clarification or additional detail. Here, I found myself reading the text first, maybe because it was on the left side or because it was not very clear what the images were of. My favorites, and the ones that made the most sense to me, were “The Silent Majority” and the one with the tree (the text felt like a caption or the back of a postcard in this case).