Toward the photograph's studium

At LACMA. 

For Barthes, not only is the photograph a disorder but so is the attempt to write on the photograph as the subject. The disorder results from "the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis—but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system" (8). And yet, any searching discussion on photography seeks the bare essentials that reside in the core of the photograph, not so much as a craft or practice or form of art, but as an object. The disorder stems from this core relational tension that imbues any examination of the subject matter: how to arrive at the essence of the photograph without systematizing (reductively) a certain idea of it that may say something and the same about all photographs?   

Another reason for the disorder can be found in the in-between positions found in photography, which "drift[s] between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either" (20). The photograph is always a phenomenon, making the juncture where space, light, shadow, and time collide, persist in perceptibility when otherwise it'd be just a fleeting experience, possibly even passing without being grasped, held, stopped. Part of the question Barthes's Camera Lucida engages with is whether the photograph is a sign or an image, something in between, or rather, the two at once. Even though the boom does not proffer a definitive answer, the suggestion at the start of the boom is that because of photograph's disorderly nature, a definitely answer could only elude us.