Barthes and the Brain: Reading Cognitive Science Into Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida

Abstract

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes seems at first glance to be a book about photography. It is often classified by critics and reviewers alongside other books about photography, its subtitle is “Reflections on Photography,” and the book is filled with reproduced photographs accompanied by discussion about them. Despite all of this, labeling Camera Lucida purely as a book of photography theory is misleading. It is true that Barthes begins his venture with the declaration of purpose, “I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself,’ by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images” (3). But after embarking on this initially straightforward inquiry, Barthes finds his efforts stymied. The source of his dilemma, he says, is that all methods traditionally available for the scrutiny of the arts—sociology, phenomenology, technical criticism, historical criticism—seem, somehow, to miss the point. They lead him only to “ultimate dissatisfaction” (8).