Swords?

I don’t know what about Barthes changed, but I found myself liking him in this book, as opposed to in Mythologies. My copy of Camera Lucida has various meaningful and meaningless annotations in what appear to be several languages, and there are several at the beginning that focus on death. At any rate, death and photography makes me think of Goosebumps (Say Cheese and Die).

I don’t think there’s a single untruth in the whole book (well, other than the few things from the beginning that he must rethink or rephrase near the end as he works through them in his thoughts). The main emphasis, that photographs display “that-has-been,” was, is, and always will be true. In terms of digital cameras, there is no way to retain, instantly, the situation of a photograph without it becoming a video. Therefore, as soon as it is taken, the referent has become changed, however slightly, whether by temporal or physical displacement. This quality of the photo being permanently of one referent, as it was in the past, automatically links it to death.

I don’t think you can take a photo that isn’t reminiscent of death. Even the brightest, happiest photos (like those in Kodak Picture Enhancer [or something] commercials), are frozen in time. You must recognize that, relative to the time in the photo, those people are going to die. I think, and have no reason to believe that nobody else does, the very attraction of photos comes from the fact that the moment captured doesn’t last forever (“take a picture, it lasts longer”). The photo comes with (or recreates) a memory, and, for whatever reason, it seems people desire to live on in memory. Like biographies and such, the photo becomes, similar to what Bazin said, a corporeal replacement. This is “the preservation of life by a representation of life” (Bazin, 10). Thus, the photo, consciously or not, is a weapon with which to fight death, though, paradoxically, an eerie harbinger of the death it is to fight. You can have a pretty sword, but it’s still a sword.