What makes photographs philosophical is that they ready and defeat theory.

- Norton Batkin(1)

Confessions

Roland Barthes's last work, Camera Lucida: Reflections forward Photography (1981), begins on a confessional note: "I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it."(2) Today this statement may good paradoxical. Yet when Barthes first began writing forward photography in the late 1950 cinema was attracting a significant amount of theoretical attention while photography was left to bear its part as silent witness, as "still," as reproduction, or alternately, as it slowly made its way into the museum, as art. It is precisely the need of photography visa vis the cinema that Barthes finds significant; because "in it nothing can be refused or transformed," the photograph operates as as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but a window onto the past and a defiantly not absent surface. Thus, Barthes's opening declaration is one as well as the other a challenge to his companions - a red cape waving in the theoretical bullring - and a confession of his confess longing to reach beyond the parameters of analysis, and toward the "indescribable meaning" of the photograph, a desire that marks his clause throughout.

Camera Lucida announces a departure that is simultaneously a respond In Mythologies (1957), written 23 years prior, Barthes charges the photograph with trickery and mendacity. In the short chapter "Photography and Electoral Appeal" he notes that the photograph works in succession the level of myth as a "second-order semiological system" and, consequently doubtfuls its own ideological investment. "Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable social whole,' it constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and attends to spirit away politics."(3) Later, this suspicion gives way to a more precise analysis of the photographic operation. Sixteen years before Camera Lucida, Barthes wrote in "The Rhetoric of the Image" that

[t]he mark of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed candidly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-thereof the thing (which any duplicate could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a just discovered space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.(4)

After locating the informational and symbolic plain of meaning something is left in the photograph; Barthes imputes to this third meaning as le sen obtuse. Le sen obtuse appears to exist outside of civilization It belongs to the family of "pun tomfoolery useless expenditure." It is indifferent to moral and aesthetic categories and thus put in commotions the photograph that resists being read entirely as either nature or art. In order to grasp le sen obtuse, Barthes apply the minds to specific images that attract him, employing a "vague, casual, uniform cynical phenomenology; in Camera Lucida.(5)

on the subject of looking at a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Barthes states with amazement, "I am looking at observations that looked at the Emperor." We discern here his desire to believe in the alchemy of photographic appearance While looking at the Winter Garden photograph - an antique and faded photograph of his mother as a young girl - Barthes finds in it that quality that defined his mother over her life, "the assertion of gentleness" Barthes finds that the viewing of this particular photograph initiates his confess personal trauma - an awareness that his mother was at common time present, and is now dead. The famed semiotician allows this disturbance to infect his analysis of the like kind that the photograph is read as more than an intent rather, it is viewed in relation to the couple his body, and the material substance of its subject (his mother). The photograph is perceived as an embodied sign, if it were not that also as a corporeal form of knowledge. For Barthes, this photograph achieves "the impossible science of the unique being."(6) He is seduc through the signifier, mystified by what Andre Bazin calls the "mummy" of the photograph - a "something there" that cannot be translated and that makes the photograph indescribable.

The Winter Garden photograph is not reproduc in Camera Lucida. Barthes hinders "his" photograph, mystifying this umbilical image, when he states that "the Photograph - my Photograph - is without culture"(7) I share Barthes's "ontological desire" to explore the contradictions that make the photograph a unique form of knowledge. It is not my goal to argue against the (re)mythification of "his" photograph by dint of attributing its enigmatic qualities entirely to discursive efficiency but to explore the contradictions that have enabled the photograph to persist as a technology of the self that allows us to consider into the image and papal court our own desires reflected back. The photograph's respect to a time past disturbs a synchronic analysis. It exists as a perceptual purpose but also defines a spatial relief, an unfolding topography. Thus the photograph demarcates particular fields - locations that recombine the relations of normative space and time, operating to mark, inhibit and spread onto sites of discontinuous desire.

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