In Camera Lucida, Barthes seeks, like Proust does in his book, In Search of Lost Time, to recover a life that has vanished. In a photograph, this moment has been preserved; the trace of the past in present is a document, and bears witness to what has existed. Every photograph is therefore a ‘certificate of presence’ (Barthes, R.1993). So in fact, the photograph is mechanically repeating what could never be repeated; the past becomes as certain as the present.

 

He says that the effect the photo has on him is not to restore what has been abolished by time but to attest that what he sees has existed. It is therefore a 'superimposition: of reality and the past'. Its primitive effect is reference and its emphasis is: ‘this happened’ as opposed to ‘this image means’. Photographs can therefore be seen to perhaps give a sense of déjà vu and an enigmatic understanding of a world we didn’t know.

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Barthes sees Death implicit in each photograph. He is struck by how the photograph moves you back through time, how you always have the past with you. Each photo documents a 1/60 of a second that existed. Death is the final moment of a life and the last possible photograph. At the same time, Barthes sees the photograph as a kind of resurrection. It continues after the person is gone. It has a life of its own, in scrapbooks, on walls, in cardboard boxes, as long as the paper exists. Barthes likes the fact that what he sees has existed in front of the lens. 

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What is there in certain photographs, he asks, that attracts me? Barthes distinguishes between the spectator's attraction, because of the interest, curiosity to an image: the studium, and something 'which arises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me': the punctum. This is the detail that catches the eye and jogs the memory etc. 

 

Having also read On Photography by Susan Sontag, I find Barthes a gentler, more private and also an insinuating voice on the subject.