Obscura, Niger, Niveus Friday August 26, 2005
I get very annoyed with Roland Barthes book, Camera Lucida. ‘Obscura’ is a more relevant term than his ‘lucida’ when he goes rambling on with his strange intellectual excess. Quite often he ties you up with contrived language that appears intelligent, but when you look more closely you realise it either makes no sense or could be expressed in less fanciful and more direct terms. I get tired and exasperated with rhetorical games in academia, politics, marketing, business, and art. There’s a book by a Princeton University Professor, Harry Frankfurt, called On Bullshit. Amazon summarises his volume like this:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.
Actually the function it serves is very clear. It supports the personal, intellectual, commercial or political interests of the author. In academia it becomes a rhetorical game where the aim is to construct an argument or thesis with an aesthetic, rather than a pragmatic or properly philosphical meaning: one that has a critical rather than an indulgent self referential dimension, using thought and language not to imagine and embellish but to elucidate and clarify. In Camera Lucida, Barthes’ conceptual process is like poetry more than philosophy, and it is bad poetry. I’ve persevered with it though, reading it thoroughly several years ago and currently reading it again. And he does have clear, succinct and interesting comments, punctuating his irritating prose. At one point for example he compares photography to cinema:
In front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same iamge; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness (55).
I agree that pensiveness lies at the heart of photography; I have myself compared this to Wordsworth’s notion of emotion recollected in tranquility. It’s especially apparent, or especially obvious, in black and white images because they materialise the gap between perception and image. Compared to colour black and white work is an abstracted interpretation of reality, consistent with McLuhan’s remark ‘the medium is the message’. Herein lies its romantic, even nostalgic appeal when digital colour work is the more prevalent form.
Traditional black and white photography has evident graininess that digital cameras have avoided: what used to be a technical limitation now assumes a ‘character’ associated with silver halide alchemy, quiet darkroom labour, and acetate film that may no longer exist on the market. These sensual, meditative activities are for some people inherently and qualitatively part of photography, and as a result they dislike the new digital methods. I must admit, I would enjoy having a home darkroom, and processing black and white film like I once did. I’d find it pleasurable to slosh developer over a print again, watching it slowly emerge in the red-lit gloom. I’d enjoy the latitude of film again, not worrying about blowing out highlights all the time with a digital camera. But I also know the smoothness of digital sensors – especially the Canon CMOS – is a technical advance, particularly useful for colour work where chromatic effect is crucial, as much as tonal gradation and textures.
In Camera Lucida Barthes is himself pensive – related to the French term meaning thoughtful or meditative – in relation to his experience of photographs and how they appear to capture life, but always and substantially deceive: notably, where the image is of a deceased person you loved. Significantly, the photographs he considers are black and white.
