The "That-Has-Been" in the Age of Instantaneousness

For Barthes in Camera Lucida, the essence of the photograph lies in the past, in the realization that the object represented (and he emphasizes this word as the photographer's re-presentation of something that has been to the spectator of the future) existed at one point. It is at once an emphasis of the object's reality - for unlike the less exact arts of copying, photography is dependent upon this reality - and a distancing from it, for the reality expressed is one of the past with little or nothing to speak of regarding the present day. The photographs Barthes uses as a basis for these arguments largely stand by this concept, and it is reasonable to say they represent a decent cross-section of the photography readily available to him, or at least those aspects he found personally interesting - those which for him possessed a distinct punctum. These images are frequently historical, drawing out Barthes' fascination with the photographic image as the bearer of "that-has-been". In this one-time presence, he seeks to draw a line to the concept of Death; the historicism of the photographic image as a thing that has passed forces the possibility of death, which becomes inevitability in the sympathetic spectator. The photographic object occurs at one point and one point only, without reference to its progress within the passage of time, and that point is firmly rooted in the past, a period of "that-has-been". The spectator may wonder whether the photographic subject remains, but the possibility exists that it does not or has dramatically changed since its static image was captured. That possibility is enough to root Barthes' photograph in the awareness of Death and divide it from any sort of life of the present. The "that-has-been" cannot simultaneously be, except in the form of the image which can speak no further than the past existence of its object.

By the publication of Camera Lucida in 1980, photography was already played a significant role in both art and personal life, and yet since then, developments have occurred that Barthes could not possibly have anticipated. The foremost of these has been the ubiquity of the digital image, a phenomenon that with each advance further challenges the notion of the "that-has-been". The rampant spread of the digital camera, especially when correlated with expansions of Internet connectivity in public places and for non-standard devices, has led to an environment in which the photographic image can truly represent the instantaneous, the current, the up-to-date - the unmistakably living. There is no "that-has-been" when cell phone snapshots are uploaded to the Internet literally seconds after being taken; by the time these images have sufficiently faded into the background of the past as to cast Barthes' proverbial shadow of Death, they have almost certainly been replaced with others. The modern desk setup is as if a communications platform centered upon the image; without leaving one's chair, it is extraordinarily facile to create and transmit an immediate, living image that denies its own flatness and origin in the past. It is only necessary to to reach for a camera, snap a shot of the self or environment, plug the memory card into a convenient slot on their laptop, and send it on its way to a distant friend or loved one. These spontaneous creations of the image are often inspired by a conversation in another medium, removing even the short intermediary period between the recipient's sporadic glances at their inbox; rather, they are waiting when the image arrives, an image that has just been taken and is unmistakably a thing of the present. The punctum of these images is as much their immediacy as any visual element, for it denies these ingrained notions Barthes suggests of photography. The past as the realm of the photograph is not so strictly defined as to absolutely begin in mere seconds, minutes, or even hours back: although much can happen in this time, it is important to note that it very frequently does not. The photographic object is visually unchanged in these intervals, and this knowledge creates a blurring of the temporal dividing lines, allowing the digital photograph a place in the present, the land of the living and vital. It has not yet had time to take on the distancing reality of the photograph as history, to "have been"; it simply is, and in this it is a reminder of life and not the spectre of Death Barthes proposed - not a re-presentation of something finished but a presentation of something new.