Camera Lucida and Affect: Beyond representation

AbstractAlmost since its inception the photograph has functioned as a lens that appears to open the past while simultaneously marking the boundary between the past and the living present. In fact, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida specifically explored how this condition of photography operates on viewers, creating the experience of an anterior-future tense. This essay offers a close reading of Barthes's notion of the role of the "punctum" and the analysis of it that the "post-photography" debates of the late 1980s produced in order to explore how images (analogue and digital alike) trigger "immaterial signals" that convey affective qualities. Through an in-depth analysis of affect the essay further demonstrates how images have the potential to create non-narrative and illogical associations with the embodied memories of viewers. Notes1 For a review of the post-photography debates see Mitchell, Lister, and Siemens Kulturprogramm.2 Although most of the texts concerned with post-photography define analogue photography in terms of its indexical condition, the most succinct expression of this can be found it Timothy Druckrey's essay "L'Amour Faux."3 By the end of his career, Peirce's typology had delineated 66 classes of signs (see The Essential Peirce 481).4 Here, it might also be noted that Barthes titled his book La chambre claire, a French phrase that refers to the optical apparatus, which in English, is called "Camera Lucida." Unlike the technology of the better known "Camera Obscura," which simply requires light and a dark room, the camera lucida is a device designed to operate through the viewer who must perform two actions: witness the referent and recreate its representation. Significantly, these are the same two actions that Barthes attributes to the viewers of photographs.5 Diana Knight has noted that Barthes' text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes includes a picture of his Aunt Alice as a young woman posed with her parents in a manner that recalls the composition of the Van der Zee photograph (see Knight 139–40).6 For other critical observations about Camera Lucida as an exceptional departure in Barthes's work, see MacCabe (73). Also see Tagg (226–33). In addition other critics have argued that Camera Lucida expands on ideas that Barthes alluded to in his earlier essays, primarily "The Third Meaning" (see Krauss).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMarie ShurkusMarie Shurkus is a Los Angeles-based contemporary art historian and media theorist. Her research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, media and philosophy. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, CA as well as a core faculty member in the MFA in Visual Art Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. She has written about the work of Michael Asher, Eugenia Butler, Jack Goldstein, Zoe Leonard, Allen Ruppersberg, The Feminist Art Workers, and others. She was an editor and contributing author to the Pacific Standard Time catalogue: It Happened Here: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles (1969–1973).