Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Roland Barthes’ classic, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography, is an exquisite book, deeply thought-provoking. Had he and I been contemporaries, we would have had much to talk about.
Photography is unlike other arts, it captures certainty. To look at a photograph is to be confronted evidentially with existence, the fact of having been there or having been thus.
Naturally however not all photographs are equal. The best, especially of people, can reveal something remarkably intangible. These photos hold what Barthes calls “the air” or essence of a person. Beyond mere presence, that is, human expression, an exceptional photograph permits us “to discover” a truth in the face upon which we gaze.
Musing, Barthes writes that perhaps the air is something moral, “mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value.” Accompanying the body like a shadow, the air, if caught by the photographer, “gives life” to an image. Regrettably, however, all too often this veracious shadow is missed. Through a lack of luck or talent, the photographer may perpetuate presence, but not the luminosity of an inimitable human life.
All of this incites me to think further. Perhaps the air, ‘discovered’ expressing the truth of the subject, is the secret of personhood?
Metropolitan John Zizioulas says, historically and existentially, the concept of the person as a unique and unrepeatable identity, which is so important in our time, “is indissolubly bound up with theology.”
In classical Greco-Roman culture, the human being could only strive to become a unique person, albeit temporarily and therefore tragically. Fighting the gods and fate, an individual could challenge, but not escape the social or legal roles (let alone death) he or she was forced to play within the cosmos. The face was a mask, a device without personal ontological content since particularity was considered not ultimately absolute.
Conversely, Christian patristic thought developed a concept of the individual person consisting in the mysterious fact that “love can endow something with uniqueness, with absolute identity and name.” Love sees, because it is creative, what the one without love cannot see. Love therefore saves by raising a human life above the contingency of biological existence, out of anonymity, by permitting a human being to become uniquely known.
When Barthes encounters the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother and cries, “There she is!”, he writes that in this photograph alone, out of numerous photos, “I do much more than recognize her…I discover her: a sudden awakening…a satori in which words fail, the rare, perhaps unique evidence of the ‘So, yes, so much and no more.'”
He makes seemingly the claim for something ethical, something of unique character, he believes is possessed by her, captured fortuitously on paper. Perhaps however what he is seeing can be explained differently, a reality that because it is personal, in the words of Zizioulas, “goes beyond what passes away into what always and truly is.”
