Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

Recently I have read 'Camera Lucida' by Roland Barthes, which is a far more personal approach to an analysis of photography than Susan Sontag's. His problems with photography stem from his search for the 'perfect' picture of his dead mother. The first part of the book Barthes takes a more objective viewpoint of photography, and identifies two planes of an image. He calls the one the 'studium' of an image, which is the subject and meaning of the photograph. The other, he names the 'punctum', which refers to the aspect or detail of an image that hold our gaze.  Barthes writes about the punctum as often piercing through the studium of a photograph. It's the second half of the book where it becomes more moving, when he writes more about his grief for his mother's death and begins searching for a perfect picture of her. Barthes wants to find a picture of his mother that encompasses everything he remembers about her visually, as well as summing up her personality, which proves to be an almost impossible task. He eventually discovers a photograph that depicts the 'air' about his mother, when she was aged only five. There is an immediate sense of jubilation as Barthes finds this picture and has an onrush of emotions triggered by her photograph and the memory of her. Barthes never shows the photograph, making it clear that it is a personal journey: 'It exists only for me. For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.' This is the thing about personal photographs; - other people's are rarely interesting because we have no personal attachment to it, there is no 'studium' as Barthes would put it. This is why I am far more interested in the idea of collective memory rather than individual memory. My search for photographs tends to be the opposite to that of Barthes', I am interested in images that are not personal, that anyone may have already seen in real life. My hope would be that viewers might believe they have already have experienced the memory, even if they remember it just through looking at the photographs and starting to believe that the images are familiar and in fact their own memory. Barthes' view on photography is that 'it actually blocks memory, [it] quickly becomes a counter-memory one day, some friends were talking about their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had none left.' I find this idea of memory being replaced by memory really interesting, we start to forget what we actually remember and what we have just been shown through images. Barthes' view on photography in relation to memory is not very different from Susan Sontag's, who writes that photographs are 'not so much an instrument of memory, as an invention of it or a replacement.' [Susan Sontag, On Photography, pg. 165].

In my work I am interested in depicting the visualisation of a memory. I try to do this through fragmentation - some part of the image are photographs (some clear, and others less so), to refer to the idea of photographs filling in the blanks of our memory, or even replacing it. In other parts of the image I like to use other methods such as drawing and painting, to portray the other parts of a memory, possibly the less well remembered; what there are no photographs of to serve as a reminder or memory replacement.