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.
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