Camera Lucida

            These chapters by Roland Barthes struck me as another interesting view of photography. Roland describes that he does not think of photography as painters having made it, but rather as scientists that have made it. Roland liked the idea that when you’re holding a photograph, you are touching the light that literally bounces off of the person and captured on the film, rather than light and shadows that have been painted on or added just for visual effect.

This idea of the photograph caught my eye most. The fact that he says photographs are not a look at the past, but a look at what is still alive, is what seems to prove this new way of thinking. Sure photographs generally are taken to document a moment in time that soon becomes the past, but after further thinking I came to see that he meant that the history is the photograph, the story is what happened after it. He showed a picture of a boy named Ernest dating back to the early 1900s. Instead of thinking ‘wow that is an old historical photo’ you can think ‘I wonder where Ernest is now?’ Photography becomes a tool of seeing the world in different ways. I feel as though Roland’s thought process is a much deeper view of what is real, and agree that there is so much more to what you see in the picture. 

Shelby