Response to ‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes

Response to ‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes

I did not like this article, not because I disagrees with everything he said, but because all he did was complain.  It was also difficult to read because every five words there were parentheses with an unneeded snide or sarcastic comment.

However, I kind of agree with him with his statement in the beginning that color in unneeded make up on a photograph.  That might be true sometimes, but surely not all the time.  Color can be a wonderful and horrible thing, depending on the photograph, and the photographer.  If the photographer knows what they are doing, they can use color to aid them.  It can help convey an emotion or mood, or, it can create a false emotion or mood.  But I think that older people are really the ones who live and die by black and white photography, and younger people (for the most part) are the ones all about color.  Yes, color makes photography more difficult, but that doesn’t mean that all the old fartsy photographers have to hate it.  That being said, it is difficult to all of a sudden switch to color.  A lot of these photographers probably started in the darkroom with black and white film.  Today, most photography classes start with digital and start with color.  It is cheaper and more convenient, especially in school systems where money is scarce.  So thats all people my age are use to. And so they all don’t understand black and white photography.  I think that Barthes’ opinion is based on personal experience and pigheadedness.  From his writing, I do not get the sense that he really knows what he is talking about.  He just sounds old and cranky and annoying. 

I do agree with his statements that state that photographs are tied to dates and that they prove that something happened.  For example, when people are small children, we don’t usually remember every little thing that we did; just snippits.  But with photography, we can look at a photo that out parents took of us playing and say “oh yeah.  I must have played with that when I was little.”  But photographs can also create false memories that way.  If we know we did something because of proof from a photograph, we may create a false memory of it, because we have proof of it with the photograph.  

Even though I agree and disagree with Roland Barthes, I still think that he doesn’t know what he is talking about and just spouting his opinion with some good points here and there.