How do we make sense of our world? For me, always, images have been central. I’m a visual learner and a visual processor of both intellectual and sensory information. My memory is entirely tied to visual representations. Situations that I should process in words, numbers, sounds, or touch are recalled in my brain through images. I remember history through a progression of illustrations—even if I myself have to conjure the illustrations. I recall data by way of charts and graphics—or failing those, of the simple recollection of the shape of the numbers on a page. Music is called up as color for me, and I remember the softness of my dog’s fur or my daughter’s cheek via the visual reminiscence of the curly coat or the flushed skin.
That kind of processing results in an overflowing file cabinet of images in my brain, a virtual repository of personal scenes and faces alongside visual notations from the public sphere. In that cluttered cabinet, certain images, especially photographic ones, stand out as aesthetic, political, and even moral markers.
When I reference my “file cabinet,” there are certain pictures that surface first, that surface repeatedly, that are always accessible. I always wondered why. Philosopher, semiotician, and literary theorist Roland Barthes taught me why. He taught me to be consciously, photographically, and visually literate.
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) is arguably the most influential book yet written about individuals’ encounters with photographs. I read it in the midst of my doctoral program in the history of American civilization at Harvard, during my immersion in historiography and literary theory. I have since read and assigned it countless times. According to Geoffrey Batchen, a professor of photography and editor of a collection of essays on Camera Lucida, Barthes’s last work is likely “the most quoted book in the photographic canon” (2009, x).
When I teach media literacy, my favorite lecture is always the one I give about photography. I know my students have been looking at pictures their entire lives, and I know they have been taking and sharing photos at least since they first received a camera-equipped mobile phone. But even those students who consider themselves “photographers” have rarely considered the quantity and quality of information, messages, perspectives, and emotions they both imbibe and disseminate through photography. Why do people at different news outlets choose different photos—or occasionally the same photo—when they cover the same event? Do their choices have to do with differences in audiences? With the biases of their editors? With their understanding of the meaning of the story? With their assessment of what they ran two hours ago and what they might run two hours from now? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
These are important questions—media literacy questions, life questions. And these questions are just a few of those that I raise in the first fifteen minutes of my class on photography. This is why I believe that Camera Lucida is such a valuable text. Barthes gives explanations for what the world observes, but rarely thinks about, in images. Barthes explains the banality of so much photography and why few images hit their viewers with gut-wrenching force.
Roland
How do we make sense of our
How do we make sense of our world? For me, always, images have been central. I’m a visual learner and a visual processor of both intellectual and sensory information. My memory is entirely tied to visual representations. Situations that I should process in words, numbers, sounds, or touch are recalled in my brain through images. I remember history through a progression of illustrations—even if I myself have to conjure the illustrations. I recall data by way of charts and graphics—or failing those, of the simple recollection of the shape of the numbers on a page. Music is called up as color for me, and I remember the softness of my dog’s fur or my daughter’s cheek via the visual reminiscence of the curly coat or the flushed skin.
That kind of processing results in an overflowing file cabinet of images in my brain, a virtual repository of personal scenes and faces alongside visual notations from the public sphere. In that cluttered cabinet, certain images, especially photographic ones, stand out as aesthetic, political, and even moral markers.
When I reference my “file cabinet,” there are certain pictures that surface first, that surface repeatedly, that are always accessible. I always wondered why. Philosopher, semiotician, and literary theorist Roland Barthes taught me why. He taught me to be consciously, photographically, and visually literate.
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981) is arguably the most influential book yet written about individuals’ encounters with photographs. I read it in the midst of my doctoral program in the history of American civilization at Harvard, during my immersion in historiography and literary theory. I have since read and assigned it countless times. According to Geoffrey Batchen, a professor of photography and editor of a collection of essays on Camera Lucida, Barthes’s last work is likely “the most quoted book in the photographic canon” (2009, x).
When I teach media literacy, my favorite lecture is always the one I give about photography. I know my students have been looking at pictures their entire lives, and I know they have been taking and sharing photos at least since they first received a camera-equipped mobile phone. But even those students who consider themselves “photographers” have rarely considered the quantity and quality of information, messages, perspectives, and emotions they both imbibe and disseminate through photography. Why do people at different news outlets choose different photos—or occasionally the same photo—when they cover the same event? Do their choices have to do with differences in audiences? With the biases of their editors? With their understanding of the meaning of the story? With their assessment of what they ran two hours ago and what they might run two hours from now? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
These are important questions—media literacy questions, life questions. And these questions are just a few of those that I raise in the first fifteen minutes of my class on photography. This is why I believe that Camera Lucida is such a valuable text. Barthes gives explanations for what the world observes, but rarely thinks about, in images. Barthes explains the banality of so much photography and why few images hit their viewers with gut-wrenching force.