One of the most famous pieces of texts about photography is Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. It is an all around fascinating book about photography’s relationship with mortality; questioning the very reason we take photographs at all. This book has given me a lot of insight into my own photographic process and also has heavily influenced my senior thesis project. If you plan to read the book spoiler alert ahead: you might not want to read this next part so here’s a tiktok about a sheep.
One of the most important details in Barthes book is the way in which he describes this photograph of his deceased mother in a winter garden as a child. This photograph is so pivotal in the writing, yet as the viewer we never see it. Barthes argues that to us the objective reader, it would be a nothing more than a normal photograph. He describes the photograph so detailed down to the way the edges are torn and frayed. To him, it shows his own mortality. This relationship with photography, memory and mortality is something I am heavily thinking about in my thesis in which I have my own version of a winter garden photograph.
Barthes writing and the winter garden photograph will forever impact your thought process. It makes you question everything around you. Like how would Barthes logic of mortality in photographs hold up in today’s world? In this world where we carry a mini camera in our pockets- Is every selfie an act of preservation? Is social media somehow a way for us to preserve our own memory- a version of ourself that we would want others to always think of us as? Idk man maybe just don’t take art classes because they will seriously re-wire your brain.
You can purchase your own copy of Camera Lucida here