Camera Lucida Response

To be honest this was a little rough to get through. I think I am just not compatible with this particular writer’s style. They were a bit superfluous in their wording. I did, however, enjoy one part. Barthes wrote of a time he was given a photo of himself and could not remember ever having been there. I, too, have had that happen. I was helping my parents move last summer and I had the job of packing up the family photos. Now, most of them are of a time that I would not have been able to remember anyways and yet there was this one stack of resent photos that I could not remember being there. They were of my sister and i a few years ago when I was about 16. This is presumably an age to which I would be able to recall and yet I could not remember. No matter how hard I tried it never came to me. It was a bit like a reverse Déjà vu. Barthes wrote about his own experience saying “This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a "detective" anguish”. I would very much agree with that description. I have always thought of photography as a way to capture a moment in order to revisit it later. This was very much a discovery of a new power of the photograph. A photo has the power to add uncertainty to my once reality and to be the sole keeper of a piece of that time.