Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The literal photograph reduces us to the scandal of horror, not to the horror itself.
The failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing; ... [it] only make[s] the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.
I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the
punctum.
Of all the structures of information, the photograph appears as the only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’ message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence. In front of a photograph, the feeling of ‘denotation,’ or, if one prefers, of analogical plentitude, is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impossible...
The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph… I have no other recourse than this irony: to speak of the “nothing to say.”
[The] purely ‘denotative’ status of the photograph, the perfection and plentitude of its analogy, in short its ‘objectivity,’ has every chance of being mythical (these are the characteristics that common sense attributes to the photograph).
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater... Photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of
Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
I suffer, motionless. Cruel, sterile deficiency: I cannot
transform my grief, I cannot let my gaze drift; no culture will help me utter this suffering which I experience entirely on the level of the image’s finitude (this is why I cannot
read a photograph: the Photograph—my Photograph—is without culture: when it is painful, nothing in it can transform grief into mourning.
