Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (review)

Is there a text on photography cited more often or more approvingly these days than Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida? Does any new book on photography fail to mention "that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead"?¹ Can any writer on photography resist the trap of recycling, as if it were a properly analytical distinction, Barthes's openly subjective opposition between the studium and punctum of a photograph? At one point a useful provocation to historicists, Barthes's last book has been well and truly canonized in both academic and wider circles. It makes one nostalgic for the times when serious photography theorists like Victor Burgin and John Tagg were roasting Barthes for betraying the cause. Along with Abigail Solomon-Godeau and others, they spent the late 1970s and 80s on a critical enterprise diametrically opposed to the stated objectives of Camera Lucida. Whereas Barthes set out to discover the "essence" of photography, Anglo-American photography theory at that juncture was at great pains to demonstrate that there was no essence of photography, that photographs could only be read and understood in terms of the institutions which frame them (Art, art-historical, medical, legal, scientific) and the practices which define them (amateur, professional, commercial, documentary, surveillance). In this project, they regularly drew inspiration from writings by Barthes from the 1960s, writings that he seemed in Camera Lucida to be disavowing. No wonder Tagg felt compelled to indict the book for its "regressive phantasy … of photographic realism."²

In retrospect, Camera Lucida was not the act of heresy that it was taken to be. As it turns out, the "ontological desire" (3) Barthes sets out to satisfy quickly reaches an impasse, for encountering the essence of photography prevents one from saying much at all about it. Here, for me, is the crucial passage: "I exhaust myself in realizing that this-has-been; for anyone who holds a photograph in his hand, here is a fundamental belief, an 'ur-doxa' nothing can undo, unless you prove to me that this image is not a photograph. But also, unfortunately, it is in proportion to its certainty that I can say nothing about this photograph" (107). Anyone who has tried to write about photographs soon runs up against the fact that they are, as Barthes puts it, "matte and somehow stupid" (4). What choice, then, but to consider them in relation to those meaning-making institutions and practices which produce them? And yet, Camera Lucida continues to exercise a powerful influence, its subjective approach licensing, for example, the first-person meanderings of Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment (2005). It is also the guiding theoretical text for Jay Prosser's Light in the Dark Room, which adopts Barthes's basic proposition on the "referential" nature of photography, dedicates its first chapter to a reading of Camera Lucida, and at the end confesses to a misreading of the text in an earlier book (Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality). Prosser's reading of Camera Lucida is careful and subtle, recounting some of the irritation and misunderstanding Barthes engendered, and his public correction of the error in the previous book takes considerable intellectual honesty. However, an admission of fault is not proof against further error, and Light in the Dark Room continues to betray the text that legitimates its discourse. As well as wheeling out yet again that purely private category, the punctum, Prosser cannot resist the temptation to make photos speak, with the very unBarthesian verb "reveal" much in evidence. He also succumbs throughout to the first-person plural; for example, starting his book with a universalizing gesture one cannot imagine Barthes risking: "We treat photographs as if they had a kind of presence. Photography is the commonest way for us to record our own and our loved ones' lives" (1).

The subject of Light in the Dark Room is a minor twentieth-century genre that Prosser has unearthed...