‘Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. Although the nature of punctum is elusive, most often it hides in some detail that catches the eye of the spectator. In this sense, punctum is the opposite of ‘surprises’: rare or shocking events captured by the camera, or special effects used by the photographer. ‘What I can name cannot really prick me’, Barthes explains. If they don’t, the reason might be the photographer’s intention becoming obvious to the spectator. These ‘stings’, ‘specks’ or random details in a photograph cut through the homogeneity of the studium and ‘prick’ the spectator, as Barthes puts it: some photos ‘prick’ him, while other don’t. The spectrum, which is the referent in the photograph, comprises two elements: studium, or the cultural knowledge that allows the spectator to understand what is captured in the photograph, and punctum, which in Latin means ‘a wound, a mark left by a pointed instrument’ and which ‘breaks the studium’. However, in the first part of the work Barthes devises a language that allows him to do so, introducing the concepts of the operator, the spectator and the spectrum.

According to Barthes, this ‘adherence’ of the referent makes it hard to formulate photography’s fundamental feature, ‘the universal, without which there would be no Photography’. And ‘… the photograph is never distinguished from its referent’.

‘Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner’, he writes, ‘a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see’. In Camera Lucida, the French philosopher moves away from the semiotics of binary oppositions and effectively envisages photography as a signifier without a signified. Roland Barthes’s essential study explores the nature of photography through the search for its special ‘genius’.Īlthough Roland Barthes often used photographic materials in his structuralist analyses of the bourgeois myths in mass culture and advertising, it was not until his last years that he published a collection of essays entirely devoted to photography.

Camera obscura roland barthes