Barthes, two Polaroids and three hostages (part 2).

1. Perhaps we could begin again from the same source. The text that identifies the photograph on the cover of the French edition of Camera Lucida ( La Chambre Claire ) is Polaroid, 1979. Thus, of course, the Polaroid occurs twice: once within the text and once as a supplementary to the text (paratext).

2. Diana Knight, in her book Barthes and Utopia: Spaces, Travel, Writing (1997), traces a history of this photograph, part of a series entitled Fragments of a Labyrinth, by Daniel Boudinet, and positions this image as directly related to the concerns of the text of Camera Lucida:

Bourdinet’s labyrinthine drawn Polaroid is surely an integral part of Barthes’s symbolic narrative of rediscovering his mother in the chamber Claire of a glass conservatory, and of his adoption of the Winter Garden Photo as a metaphorical Ariadne to guide him to the essence of photography. (pp226-227)

3. Nancy Shawcross, in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (1997), positions this photograph as a central illumination to the text of Camera Lucida also:

This image is the only one not captioned by Barthes himself. Its appearance and style of presentation play off the apparent contradictions about to be brought forth in the text itself. (p61)

4. In the essay Barthes and Proust, again collected in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes , Beryl Schlossman makes additional points in regard to the centrality of Boudinet’s Polaroid:

Barthes underscores the image’s allegorical quality of absence-presence in the context of his book: as a counterpoint of the first photograph ever taken, the set table of 1822 by Nicephore Niepce, “Polaroid” is the only other image in the Camera Lucida without a human subject. (p149)

5. Additionally, Schlossman paraphrases a text (in the same manner as I am now doing): Amplification: Barthes, Freud and Paranoia, by Mary Lydon, who also locates the Polaroid as a central focus for Camera Lucida as an image and one that foregrounds the concerns of the text itself.

6. Ron Burnett, in his essay Photographs and Images: The Polaroid. Further Notes on Roland Barthes from Cultures of Vision, also refers to the photographic image on the cover by way of another essay by W.J.T. Mitchell, The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies (noted as been collected in Picturing Theory. University of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1994):

...a polaroid photograph in the beginning of CAMERA LUCIDA which W.J.T. Mitchell has described as a veil but which I interpret as a curtain over a photographic window, as, in other words, the potential place from which a large number of ‘sights’ can be inferred or given the right circumstances, constructed.

7. The texts quoted above ascribe the use of the Polaroid as a trope motif writ large throughout Camera Lucida, that its presence at the very beginning of the book - the cover - echo’s throughout the subsequent / actual text. Can this not be taken as an invitation? Does it not afford the possibility of a rupture within Barthes statement: ‘Polaroid? Fun, but disappointing...' Can one draw the conclusion that the cover seeks to disavow, to bring into question, the statement itself? Indeed, would this not mirror the book itself: arguments presented in part one are, after-all, disavowed in the final chapter (24) entitled ‘Palinode’, the last line of which reads:

I would have to make my recantation, my palinode. (p60)

There are, of course, many more references to the Boudinet's photograph. As I come across them I will post them as updates. If you are aware of any please do leave a comment.