All of my writing on this blog so far has been about collecting bits and pieces of other people's writing that I either enjoy or admire. I admire writing that, for lack of a better word, profoundly or beautifully articulates something that is true, wonderful, or mysterious about life. Lately, I have also appreciated meaningful interpretations of the work of what people refer to as "sophisticated writers." One passage that I have particulary enjoyed comes from Richard Grusin's and Jay Bolter's Remediation. In this passage, they are commenting on a passage from Camerica Lucida by Roland Barthes:
What makes Barthes's qualified and complicated realism so interesting is the way he used it to articulate the theme of desire. The most moving picture in Camera Lucida is the one that Bartehs describes in words but does not show us: a picture of his mother as a child, which becomes for him the expression of his own desire to be reunited with a mother who has just died. For Barthes, a photograph is always an expression (not a representation) of loss, of death in fact, because it is an emanation of a past that cannot be retrieved (111).
Barthes writes that photography is an emanation of the referent.
When I read that same passage in Barthes I was struck by another about photography's limitations. A photograph cannot ever capture the fullness of the immediate experience. The photograph can recreate an image of a reality that was once present, but it's kind of like a death mask. So much of what was there in the moment that was once present cannot be recorded. What the photograph captures on paper is so much different from how I perceive and remember an experience that was unique and important to me. There is a kind of trauma in it. Barthes has said that "the trauma is a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning" (Image, Music, Text). There are infinite ways in which a lived experience reaches us and the photograph/language misses most of them.
I also think it is interesting that Barthes points to rhetorical code that interferes with an emanation of an event. Barthes writes: Certainly situations what are normally traumatic can be seized in a process of photographic signification but then precisely they are indicated via a rhetorical code which distances, sublimates and pacifies them. Barthes writes that an image is a resurrection of experience, but it is weak. "How does meaning get into the image?" he asks. "Where does it end? --and what is there beyond?
