Therefore there is no need trying to make sense of this “analog message”. The mechanical process taking place is what guarantees “objectivity” in this brief moment. When pressing down the shutter button it’s the camera that takes over control. In other words, there is no convention-based code that would control the process. Mimetic by nature, the relationship between the real object and its image is not arbitrary fixed, says Barthes, but rather the result of a mechanical process that can not be manipulated.
Since it is not necessary to have a code, according to Barthes, or a relay between the object being photographed and the photograph itself, he speaks of photography as a “message without a code”. And that’s because common sense recognizes it as such.īecause of this analogy, reality does not need a code that represents it, or in other words a code that differs substantially from the real objects shown on a photograph. However, he defines the photographic image as “perfectly analog to reality”. He asks: “What is it that a photograph transmits?” And gives the answers: “By definition the scene itself, literally reality.”Īlthough Barthes recognizes that in the process of taking a picture, a reduction (or alteration) “in proportion, perspective and color” is taking place, which results in the fact that “the image is not real”. Roland Barthes starts out by saying that a photograph is a message without a code. Nevertheless his short essay “The Photographic Message” (published in the book Image, Music, Text) offers also some very interesting reflections on visual images and what they tell us. Barthes’ work Camera Lucida – along with On Photography by Susan Sontag – is probably the most important book written about the nature image taking. His books and essays are standard reading in every university teaching photography as well as for every photographer looking for theoretical reference on the subject. Roland Barthes Roland Barthes and his concept of the photographic image as a message without a codeįrench thinker Roland Barthes is a classic author of modern philosophy about the nature of photography. “What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
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