Analysis Of The Father By Roland Barthess

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, explores the stream of consciousness Barthes experiences when viewing his Winter Garden photo. The photo depicts his mother as a child and how Barthes decides to handle the understanding of this image. For this essay my Winter Garden photo will be titled The Father. This essay will be an attempt to work through the ideas and vocabulary used by Barthes in understanding his own photo. In 1995 a photo was taken of my father and myself, referred further as The Father. The operator in the image “the Photographer” (Barthes, 9) is my mother. The subject of the photograph would be my farther and I. This is considered to be the Spectrum or “spectacle”. The viewer, or Spectator “ is ourselves” (Barthes, 9), being me. After establishing the main subjects of the image, Barthes further explores how photographs affect the Spectator. Advenience is “the attraction certain photographs exerted … even adventure” (Barthes, 19). In The Father the temporary adventure would be me seeing myself as a child being held by my father, a reaction

In The Father an individual becomes confronted with the idea of what the photograph represents. The confrontation of the photograph being an artificial reproduction of the actual event causes the Spectator to accept the image as being a referent “the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of simulacrum” (Barthes, 9). The referent is also connected to what Barthes states as “ pure contingency”. Pure contingency is the “real” in a photography; the understanding that in The Father the events did happen, but is a replication of the actual event. The Spectator is always experiencing the Punctum of an image, not the actual image, because regardless of how many times the Spectator views the image it is not reality. The second the shutter is released the image