Unclassifiable

(Taken with Canon Ti2)

I have started to re-read Barthes's Camera Lucida. Anyone interested in photography would benefit greatly from Barthes's "Reflections on Photography," as the book's subtitle reads. The added bonus is that the prose is impressively evocative, almost simulating the experience of viewing a photo, for which the captured image is at once all and not quite everything.  

The second chapter of the book confesses in the small podium that the title grants: "The Photograph Unclassifiable." The absence of the verb in the phrase suddenly amplifies the title's possibilities. The presence of the verb is, both bridging and separating the noun photograph and the adjective unclassifiable, would have rendered the statement simple, though pregnant with a bold claim: the fact that in Barthes's opinion, the impossibility to be classified constitutes the being of the photograph, which is, after all, never just an image. It is the object quality of the photograph, paradoxically, that confronts us with the most abstract part of the photograph's identity. What indeed is a photograph? The intention is not to begin dissertating on the topic here and now. But the temptation to begin speculating tentatively and incompletely on the matter cannot be defeated. 

In that second chapter, Barthes begins by beckoning someone, anyone for help. He says, "From the first step, that of classification (we must surely classify, verify by samples, if we want to constitute a corpus), Photography evades us. The various distributions we impose upon it are in fact either empirical (Professionals / Amateurs), or rhetorical (Landscapes / Objects / Portraits / Nudes), or else aesthetic (Realism / Pictorialism), in any case external to the object, without relation to its essence, which can only be (if it exists at all) the New of which it has been the advent; for these classifications might very well be applied to other, older forms of representation. We might say that Photography is unclassifiable. Then I wondered what the source of this disorder might be" (4). None of the classifying tools at hand allows us a direct grasp of the photograph as thing, an object in its own right. They are relational categories that inform us more about the particular use of the photograph than the thing itself: for what, how, where, when, all questions that may be useful in enlarging our body of knowledge about the photograph, but without ushering us closer to what Barthes calls, its "essence." Oops, problematic word. What is the essence of the photograph, of anything, for that matter? What is essence, in fact? But before we turn out gears toward metaland, I suggest that we stay a bit longer with the quote and unpack it further.   

With these introductory words that imagine for us a conflict—between the things that is the photograph and the universe of signs that attempt to inject into it ordered meaning and purpose—Barthes is nearing some sort of an impasse that also halts my thinking process: "[I]nsofar as it is licit to speak of a photograph, it seemed to me just as improbable to speak of the Photograph" (5, emphasis in original). Not only does Barthes deploy different articles (definite versus indefinite) to mark this distinction, which he has been suggesting from the start by branding the Photograph with a capital p. The conflict is, then, how to take a theoretical jab straight at the heart of the photograph without necessarily subsuming to the meaning and purpose embedded in the particular image that makes the photograph.   

In a future post I will explain what the source is according to Barthes, and also, why it is that the Photograph's condition should be viewed as a disorder.