Analysis Of Camera Lucida

After Reading Camera Lucida written by Roland Barthes, I was both confused and interested by his ideas. Though I did not understand much of the book, I was able to take a couple of his ideas and really think about how I see photos. In the future, I intend to use these ideas when I look at photos. One of his ideas that I was able to understand is the way he looks at pictures. The other one is his second definition of punctum. The first of the two ideas that interested me the most was the way Barthes looked at photos. He did not say that he liked a photo because it had his favorite animal or color. He looked deeper into the photo. He looked to see what had caught his eye the most about a photo he enjoyed. He called the catching of his eye the

Throughout the book, he described certain photos that I thought were interesting, but he did not enjoy them. An example of a photo that he didn’t enjoy was the photo of the two nuns and three helmeted soldiers, which was photographed by Koen Wessing in 1979. The main reason that it didn’t appeal to him was that it didn’t have much of a, “duality” (Barthes 23) to it. Then there were photos that had caught his eye. An example of an image he enjoyed and had his prick was a photo of an African American family; photographed by James Van Der Zee in 1926. The family is not what the punctum was. The punctum for him was the woman standing in the photography. What touched him was, “…the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter) … whose arms are crossed behind her back like a school girl, and above all her strapped pumps…” (Barthes 43). Barthes states that the reason this is his punctum is because it invokes a sense of sympathy. This idea to look closer at a photograph or even a painting seems to inspire me to go back and look at my favorite pictures and paintings and try and find the exact reason as to why I like it. I know I will not be able to always try to find my punctum in every photo or painting I enjoy,

Before reading this book, I have looked at paintings and photos of horses and just adored them. I realize now that my punctum at the time was the fact there was a horse in the image as the main focus. I looked at two of my favorites of the group of those images again to see if I can find exactly why I enjoyed it. One image I looked at was a photo of Star Like Freckles, who is a sorrel colored stallion (Harrell). When I looked at this photo again I see the stadium is the horse. Barthes defines stadium as, “…[a] very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like” (Barthes 27). My punctum for the stallion is his eye. I am drawn right to his eye; it invokes a calming sensation. This calming sensation also happens when I look a horse in the eyes directly; their eyes look wise, calm, and calculating as if they know what I feel. My second picture is a picture of two paint horses touching heads (Horses Head Hug). The punctum for me I now realize is the white markings of the horses combined. Though the markings are large, it is the fact that the markings appear to flow from one horse to the other