The bright chamber

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The bright chamber ( La chambre claire , Paris 1980) is an essay by the French philosopher Roland Barthes . His latest publication is one of the standard works on photography . Varying between systematic statements and very intimate parts, including those relating to the death of his mother, Barthes gave his essay the subtitle “Comment on photography” ( Note sur la photographie ).

Composition of the essay

The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains reviews of previous literature, delimitations and generally binding statements on photography. Barthes gives the opportunity to develop a phenomenology and a compendium of photography. The second part, on the other hand, is very intimate, which in turn unmasked the didactic statements about photography from the first part (see deconstruction ). In this part the most important photo for his media-theoretical discourse on photography appears, which is the only photo in the volume that is not printed. It is a childhood photograph of his mother that he stumbled upon while looking for the essentials of his mother while browsing through the photos after her death. Barthes thus emphasizes subjectivity in his discourse on photography: “It only exists for me (...) at best it would be of interest to your studies : epoch , clothing, photogenicity ; but it wouldn't hurt you in the least. "

Central terms of the essay

The concept of the study includes its concept of the punctum . This refers to terms from this work that are frequently quoted and often used as dichotomies . He developed it in the first part, the second part, however, he plays in the familiar for him notation (, Barthes 'écriture' of) so he swapped them not superimposed to his discourse in a " doxa ", a doctrine end to to let.

With these two terms, two different modes of action of photography can be described in a counterpoint . The study of a photograph corresponds to the general interest of the viewer in a photograph, the meaning of which he can study on the basis of its historical and culturally shaped knowledge. Barthes wrote:

"From studies I am interested in many photographs, either by putting them receiving as evidence of political life, whether by I appreciate them as a vivid history paintings: as a member of a culture (this connotation is in the word study included) I have some on the figures , on the expressions , on the gestures , on the external forms, on the actions. "

Barthes, however, is less concerned with the general message of a picture, but more essentially with the sensual effect on the viewer, that which is barely or not atopic . For this he developed the concept of the punctum :

"The second element breaks (or chanted) the study . This time it is not me who seeks it (whereas I equip the field of study with my sovereign consciousness), but rather the element itself shoots out of its context like an arrow to pierce me. [...] I would therefore like to call the second element, which throws the studies off balance, punctum ; den punctum , that also means: stab, small hole, small spot, small cut - and throw the dice. The punctum of a photograph is that accidental thing about it that captivates me (but also wounds me, hits me). "

Compare with Walter Benjamin

In many cases, parallels and comparisons are drawn between this essai by Barthes and the essays on photography by Walter Benjamin with regard to their respective perception. Jacques Derrida believed that "both penetrate, exceed and exploit the resources of phenomenological and structural analysis ". Your essays "could very well be the two fundamental texts on the so-called question of the SPEAKER in modern technology."

Point and aura

The concept of the dot in Barthes overlaps with the concept of aura in Benjamin's essay The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and in Benjamin's Little History of Photography . Like the dot, the aura creates a “chok” for Benjamin that overrides the “association mechanism”. Barthes: “So I went through my mother's photos, following a trail that led to this scream with which every language ends:“ That's it! "... a sudden awakening, triggered by no" resemblance ", the satori , where words fail, the rare, perhaps unique evidence of" so, yes, so, and nothing more "."

Look, aura, expression

Another parallel can be found in the meaning of the gaze and the tension between generalizable and subjective moments of the aura in Benjamin and the expression in the “photographic gaze” in Barthes. Benjamin: “The person who is respected or who believes viewed opens the gaze. To experience the aura of an appearance means to lend it the ability to look up. ”Like Benjamin, Barthes refers to the perceptions and experiences in which we believe we are viewed and transfers this to the paradox in the photographic gaze:“ The photographic gaze has something paradoxical about it, which one sometimes encounters in life: recently I saw a young man in a café who let his eyes wander around the room; now and then his eyes fell on me; At such a moment I had the certainty that he was looking at me without being sure that he was seeing me : incomprehensible inversion: how can one look without seeing? Apparently, PHOTOGRAPHY separates attention from perception and only puts the former into the picture, although it is inconceivable without the latter; ludicrous phenomenon: a noesis without a noema , an act of thinking without a thought, an aim without a goal. And yet this incomprehensible process produces the extremely rare appearance of an expression. ”Using a photo by André Kertész (“ Piet Mondrian in his studio ”, Paris 1926), Barthes then asks:“ How can one have an intelligent expression without something To think intelligently? ”, Since the sitter is only looking at a piece of black plastic at the moment of the photo. “It is as if the gaze that controls the economy of vision is being held back by something internal,” says Barthes, referring to another photo by André Kertész of a boy with a dog. The boy looks into the camera “with sad, jealous, fearful eyes”, but “in reality he is not looking at anything; he keeps his love and fear inside back : otherwise the VIEW ".

literature

  • Roland Barthes: The bright chamber. Comment on photography . Translated from Dietrich Leube. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1989
  • Roland Barthes: shock photos . In: Myths of Everyday Life . Suhrkamp, ​​1964
  • Roland Barthes: The rhetoric of the image . Alternative , 54, 1967 (Rhétorique de l'image) edition on the structuralism discussion
  • Gabriele Röttger-Denker: Roland Barthes for an introduction . Junius, Hamburg 1997 ISBN 3-88506-951-2 Content text at BSZ-BW, 3rd edition 2004
  • Jacques Derrida : The Deaths of Roland Barthes . In: Hans-Horst Henschen (ed.): Roland Barthes . Munich 1988
  • Susan Sontag : About Photography . Hanser, Munich 1980
  • Susan Sontag: Reflections. Writing Itself: Roland Barthes . In: The New Yorker , April 26, 1982
  • Kentaro Kawashima: "... close to the smile." The photographed face in Roland Barthes' "The Empire of Signs". In: parapluie , 23, summer 2006 full text

Web links

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  1. ↑ a b Barthes, The bright chamber, p. 35 f.
  2. ↑ See: Gabriele Röttger-Denker: Roland Barthes for an introduction. Hamburg: Junius, 1997. Page 95 ff.
  3. ↑ Derrida: Die Tode von Roland Barthes, Berlin 1987, p. 13.
  4. ^ Walter Benjamin: Small history of photography, Frankfurt 1976. P. 93.
  5. ↑ Barthes: The bright chamber, p. 119 (italics in the original).
  6. ^ Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, p. 646 f. Frankfurt 1972-1989. See also Sven Kramer: Walter Benjamin. For the introduction. Junius Hamburg, 2003.
  7. ↑ a b Barthes: The bright chamber, p. 122.
  8. ↑ a b Barthes: The bright chamber, p. 124.