![]() ![]() To him, the Operator is the Photographer. He refers to doing, undergoing and looking. There is, of course, nothing new in Barthes’s observation that photography can be the object of three practices. ![]() We will come back to this notion later in part two of the book, in which Barthes reflects on how a photograph bears witness to what has been. Barthes is conscious of three layers of time: his own present time when he is looking at the image, the time of Jesus and the time when the photograph was taken. He refers to a photograph by August Salzmann (1850) that shows the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time). But in part two of his book he returns to the fact that a photograph has more than one tense. However, even if he mentioned this amazement to others, they did not seem to share or even understand it, so he forgot it and, as he says, took a more cultural interest in photography (or rather Photography – to emphasise their meaning, he usually capitalises the words Photographer and Photography). It struck him “with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’” In his book Camera Lucida, the French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes writes that he one day happened to see a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, taken in 1852. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |