Camera Lucida wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be. Granted, it was a little hard going at times, but it really made me begin to think more about the “idea” of photography—what the photograph itself represents. Barthes’s idea that the photograph always holds its referent (signifier) within itself is really fascinating. When I see a photograph of Notre Dame there is no way to separate that photograph from Notre Dame; not like language, where the word can be easily separated from meaning by referring to other things. A photograph wouldn’t be a photograph if it didn’t stubbornly possess its referent, like a window wouldn’t be a window if it didn’t allow you to see something through the glass. I love his description of posing for photographs, something Barthes sees as an almost unconscious process that we all go through when we are aware of the photographer’s presence: “…I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’ (10). It’s a bit like what Jenny Diski was saying about the effect of photography on travel: you already see the image in the future, sitting with your friends and family showing them this moment in 2D. But what Barthes gets at is the need we all have (a futile one, so he claims) to somehow ‘come across’ in a photograph: to transfer our ‘essence’, who we are, into the moment of visual capture.

Looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose

I love this. It’s so true. Looking at a photograph we imagine the capture of a still moment, motionless throughout all future time (until the photograph perishes, as Barthes notes). It is as if that action of the arm, that look, that breath, all motion was paused for that moment: the pose of the photograph. And yet the way I have always tried to look at photos is as action on pause, as if I could imagine the motion continuing at the moment the frame stops being frozen, somewhat like the childhood belief that your toys have an existence when you are asleep or not looking. The photo is at once inanimate and alive, a paused animated motion, still and moving at the same time. There is a photograph of me playing tennis (rather badly, as I recall): my arm is in motion, carrying that movement through to the racket, which rises to meet the ball. This is the paused moment of ultimate motion, posed but not posed. The immobility of a photograph is at once its essence and its plague, a plague in the very fact that its motionlessness makes it unreal. This moment happened – Barthes is amazed by this inherent fact within the photograph – but it was not a static moment, as the photograph would seem to suggest.

Barthes talks of his amazement as a child at seeing a photograph documenting the slave trade. He notes that the reality of the photograph – the very fact that this happened and that someone was there to witness it, to record it on film – makes history more immediate. There is no mediation, he says, of historian between history and himself. This made me wonder what the impact of history would have been if the photograph had been invented earlier. It had an incredible impact on perceptions of the holocaust, for example. What if we could look back through time to the beheading of Henry VIII’s wives, a story that has become almost mythical in its proportions? Would we view it differently: less mythical, more horrific? The hideousness of human nature has been made more real by the photograph.

What I found confusing, though, was what Barthes said about colour. He seems to believe that black and white photography is more real: “I always feel [that] color is a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For me, color is an artifice”. I’m not sure what to make of this, particularly given his argument that there is no gap between photograph and referent. If we are unable to separate photograph from object photographed, then wouldn’t colour enhance this relationship, make it more real? Black and white means a gap between perception and object, like those black and white film reels that move too quickly: Charlie Chaplain waddling twice as fast as reality would have him move, so that it is difficult to see a direct connection between his actual movement and our perceptions. We are aware of the camera as a medium because it speeds up and distorts the reality. When there is colour in a photograph, when it captures something as we might see it, then we can perhaps become ignorant for a split second of the presence of the camera, of the flatness of the image, of the motionlessness.

And yet, as Barthes goes on to say, there is always a notion of likeness in looking at a photograph that shows a gap between reality and what is displayed. This doesn’t interfere with the idea of the photograph having no gap from the referent, since even if you can’t discern an exact likeness between a person in reality and a person photographed, you still can’t separate the photograph from the person (or object) photographed. But over and over again we find that photographs in some way lack that essence of a person in reality. People are said not to photograph well. It goes back to what Barthes was saying about trying to project your own personality or essence onto the photograph by your pose, conscious or unconscious. There is often a lack of likeness in a photograph which can go towards explaining the dissatisfaction we feel when looking at a photograph of a dead loved one, hoping to in some way recapture the essence of that person. What is lacking is movement, I think: this is a paused moment, real in image but not real, so that we almost expect the seeming-reality of the unreal two dimensional person to become real. It is an illusion, like a clone, but not as animated. Barthes says that photographs always inherently carry with them the notion of Death. This works on a number of levels, but basically the image speaks to the possible death of the subject – the subject can die and still be photographed, there, motionless. It reminds us, says Barthes, of our own mortality, since we ask ourselves ‘why am I still alive?’ But it is also a lack of living, because the photograph captures an unreal thing, something that is not alive, not in motion, not breathing, and yet suggestive of all those things, representative of life.

Still, there are photographs that, if they don’t have likeness to the real person, do in some way convey some quality of that person. Barthes finds a photograph of his mother as a child and suddenly finds ‘there she is’. There is something in that girl that is his mother. He identifies certain features of photographs that pinpoint reality, something transcendent, like the touch of a hand or a necklace or the necktie of a Russian man: elements of the photograph that weren’t necessarily intentional, but transcend the photograph in some way, going beyond the overall impression of the photo. What is it about that smile, for instance, that conveys something about the person smiling at a camera, dead in a moment, captured in paused motion, perhaps about to speak or laugh or sing? What makes one photograph hold the essence of someone, something, and others lack likeness to such an extent that we hardly recognise the reality of the person as he or she was at the moment the lens clicked? I don’t know, but these are fascinating questions. Photography is a window onto a world that in some way represents or duplicates ours, but is a fake copy, an unsatisfactory sign, inseparable from the referent, but not really like it either.

If we see our world through the lens of a camera, we will not experience reality—that’s perhaps what it all boils down to. When we travel, Jenny Diski tells us, we shouldn’t look at the world through a camera lens. Although, to some extent, we can’t help but do this. We are conditioned by the image-obsession of our society to have already seen the things we see in reality in others’ images. For example, when she sees an iceberg for the first time, she sees it in some way through the focus of others’ images of icebergs—television documentaries about iceberg formation, glossy magazine photographs of icebergs, National Geographic exposes—so that when she first encounters an iceberg she approaches it via these images. It’s a bit like armchair travel taken a step further, so that when we experience the world for ourselves and see with our own eyes, we are haunted by the images we have seen. How does the tourist, first looking at the Eiffel Tower, separate their experience from the hundreds of (un)real representations they have encountered in photographs and television of this beautiful structure? There is an awe involved specifically because it is an icon, but moreover there is that moment of unbelief: am I really here looking at this thing? Am I really seeing it for myself? How can I separate this from the view through a postcard or magazine photograph? Jenny Diski worries that if she takes photographs of what she sees and gives them to her daughter, her daughter will no longer feel the need to travel to Antarctica and see these things for herself, because she will have seen them, mediated through her mother. Do representations of place in some way reduce the real experience of place?

This is an issue I know Lori is working with in her dissertation. We were having an “Imaginineering Blue Sky Session” today, talking about my reading of Barthes and her readings of travel theory and how they conveniently intersected. We boiled it all down to the Mona Lisa, a cultural icon in its own right, represented again and again on posters, in books, on television, even on billboards. Each time you see it you are reminded of the real thing but removed from it one more step, so that it becomes a sign for a sign of itself, rather than a symbol for the referent: the real painting by da Vinci that hangs in the Louvre in Paris. When you do see it, there is that much-talked about moment of disappointment: it’s so small, you say to yourself, so unlike the “real thing” you had imagined. It’s as if the reality doesn’t quite match up to the grandeur you had conjured up from all these representations, blown up and enhanced over and over again, further and further removed from that moment, staring up at the real image, trying to convince yourself of the experience you are having with the painting, when in fact you are disappointed.

Lori pointed out that this disappointment has been so written about that it has almost become a sign in itself, so that when you do feel that disappointment you are able to identify with that ‘much talked about disappointment’. The fact that this identification with mis-identification happens testifies to the pervasiveness of a type of representation-syndrome in our visual society. Travel is an attempt to get away from the beaten path, but this has become so popular a notion that the ‘off the beaten path’ ideal itself has become colonized in some way: the un-beaten path is beaten because there you are, driving along a countryside lane in France somewhere, fitting this moment into the signs you have seen, over and over again, of “off the beaten path” France. “Oh, look how quaint and out of the way it is!” you say to yourself, amazed at your find, but at the same time fitting it in with the images you have seen, the books you have read, the television programmes you have watched about “off the beaten path” France, quaint because it is said to be quaint, beautiful because it is what is meant to be beautiful. This is a very cynical view, perhaps, but I think it’s true. There is such a danger of travel becoming a series of signs: checks on a tourist’s list: Eiffel Tower, check. Notre Dame, check. Tiny out-of-the-way park with leafy trees that isn’t usually seen by tourists (recommendation from a crumpled tourist guide), check. Man on bicycle with baguette, check. I’m summarizing our conversation here and stepping on Lori’s toes, but I’m sure she won’t mind. Besides, if I have to live with her while she writes her dissertation, I should at least get passionate about what she wants to write about!

I think I should stop writing now. This is getting far too long and it’s late.

I baked a cake today and licked the beaters clean.