prominent international cities. Though Nicholas Serota, the leading force behind Tate Modern, contends that the use of the old power plant was a conscious decision that stetmned from the contemporary practice of converting industrial spaces into galleries, the fact is, this choice was also strategic. Tate Modern wanted to come up with a new plan that would "rival that of the Georges Pompidou Centre" in Paris.I 1 Yes, Tate Modern is a great space to view great art but, above and beyond this, it operates to reinforce London's primacy within the world's cultural map. It is no accident that one can see the enormous structure (especially the new glass extension on the roof) from the runways of Heathrow airport! It is understood that the Gallery at the turn of the century is an icon of prestige, a peda-gogical institution and first and foremost an urban attraction.

If it seems that the discussion of Richard Long's work has been lost to a discussion circling around the curation and commer-cialization of the art gallery itself - it has. As cities vie with one another for profile and reputation, the content of the gallery space becomes less of a concern than the structure that houses it and the attention it garners for the city. The contribution Tate Modern will make to tourism - an expected 40% increase from Scandinavia, North America, Europe, and Japan - dominates the discussion around its existence. 12 Such a statistic is also indicative of Tate's desired audience. Its quantitative success is more precious than its qualitative success as a collection. Quantitative success is nothing new to the British art world that uses the media hype that surrounds the Turner prize to measure the success of its contemporary art, an annual prize that is an "accolade received on entry to the inner circle of the art establishment"- a prize that Long won in 1989, which, for me, proves why Long's calming arrangement of stones can sit happay side by side Monet's tranquil waterlaies. 13

11 Deyan Sudjic, "Modern Masters," Tate Magazine: Special Edition 21 (2000): 24.

12 Strong 44. 13 Virginia Button, T!Je Tumer Prize. (London: TI1e Tate Publishing

Ltd., 1999) 70.

IN SEARCH OF THE REAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY: An Exploration of Roland Barthes' Writ-

ings on Photography Alan Reed

This survey of Roland Barthes' writing on the subject of photography straddles a divide in his oeuvre that threatens to compli-cate this essay's coherency. Barthes wrote about photography in the very early and very late periods of his career, both when structural-ism was just emerging and when it had given way to poststructural-ism, both when he was a passionate structuralist and when he was an equally passionate poststructuralist. Thus, Barthes' writings on pho-tography are, on one hand, motivated by the cultural context of the photograph (structuralist) and, paradoxically on the other, the way the photograph eludes, exceeds, frustrates and ultimately subverts the cultural forces trying to bind its meaning (poststructuralist ).

Fascinatingly, this tension between these structuralist and poststructuralist interpretations has - from his structuralist begin-nings - always permeated Barthes' d1eories of the photograph. On the one hand, there is the inevitable saturation of the photograph by cultural inscriptions, but simultaneously Barthes has always insisted that there is something to the photograph that exceeds those inscrip-tions. This essay unfolds in two parts which share the same motiva-tion: they are both in search of that something that is beyond the cultural construction of the photograph in the hopes that it will an-swer the question, what is it about photography that stands apart from the field of language? In the first part I examine Bard1es' struc-turalist theories; in the second, his poststructuralist reflections m search of the elusive piece of the real adrift in photography.

part one

Barthes' early theory of photography revolves around the co-existence of mutually opposed forces within every photographic

image: the first being the reality that the photograph is a direct and uncoded impression of (what he calls) the denotative, analogical aspect, or analogue; the second being the connotative, cultural messages in-scribed on that impression of reality.

Despite offering these analytic categories and making excel-lent use of them, Barthes fails to satisfYingly differentiate one from the other; he neglects to find the point where denotation gives way to connotation, where the reality the photograph is an impression of ends and the cultural inscription of it begins. The discovery of that point is our goal, and to do this I have chosen a pair of photographs from a book by Dave Mckean called, fittingly, A Small Book if Black and White Lies, 2000. Mckean is one of the pioneering figures in the field of digital photography, and it is almost an understatement to say that he revels in the transfonnative possibilities of the medium. His photography, if we can call it that, borders on the fantastic. In a sense, he takes the truth of photography and tells lies with it, lies which we will use to reveal exactly what the irreducible truth, the analogical property, of photography is.

In order to analyse Barthes' theory of the photograph it is first necessary to apply it. Barthes' analyses of photographs typically begin with a written description of their denotative, analogical con-tents followed by a reading of the connotations anchored in them.

To begin tl1en, I can describe of Mckean's photograph rated Edges, 2000 (Fig. I), as a torso . of a woman.I From here I should proceed to trace, or "skim off," the connotations that are anchored in the reality that statement describes, but instead I would like to problematise its denotation, or rather, the denotation's corre-spondence to the reality of the image.

This is not the torso of a woman. It is a collage of partial photographs of a woman's torso put together in a silhouette like that of the torso of a woman. It does so convincingly, but close attention to the right side of the woman's torso, just below her breast, reveals the photograph's artifice- the body photographs do not extend to

1 Dave Mckean, A Small Book of Black a11d White Lies (Rome: Allen Spiegel Firie Arts, 2000) plate 18.

ff3

the edge of the torso. The edges of the torso are not and have never been part of a literal body, but are rather what the title of this pho-tograph refers to, that is, Serrated Edges.

Although this is a dramatic and somewhat contrived exam-ple, the trick this photograph plays on its viewer is no different than the trick every photograph plays. Namely, the reality that photogra-phy appears to represent is not at all real (denotation) but rather the first cultural inscription made on the photograph (connotation). The literal "reality" of the photographic image, insofar as it is perceived as such, is the work of language and that is something the viewer brings to the image. It is not an innate quality of the photograph.

In order to more fully understand the semiotic operations at work here, consider what it took to create the image of a woman's torso: a breast, a nipple, a navel, the hint of ribs and a belly ( denota-tive signifiers). From these parts comes the incorrect assumption of a woman's torso (denotative signified). This is to say that the denota-tive signified departs from the reality of a photograph and moves into language. In some, if not most, cases the denotated signified corresponds to the reality of tl1e situation - but there is no way to verifY that correspondence. At best, it is a coincidence, and therefore it is a matter of faith on our part that the situation was what its pho-tograph appears to be.

Here we have the point of transition from reality to lan-guage in the movement from the real thing that is the denotative signifier to the coded denotative signified. To even assume that a thmg is a signifier, that a thing is a reliable index of something else or is in some other way meaningful, is to cross over into language. In short, as soon as the photograph is recognizable as a part of some understanding of reality it is no longer real, but instead a part of language.

So, to revise Barthes' theory, it is not denotation that is the trace of the real within a photograph, instead it is the denotative signifier apart from the denotated signified, or more precisely, the denotative signifier in tl1e moment before it signifies; in the moment when it isnothing more than a thing. As soon as the denotative

nifier is associated with something else, when it becomes part of a whole, when it gains meaning, when we recognize it as signifier, it has already entered into language.

The second photograph I will present also undennines the correspondence between the reality the photograph signifies (which is to say, creates) and the reality that the photograph is. Except that instead of demonstrating the gap between denotative signifier and signified like the former photograph did, this one illustrates the dif-ference between the signifiers and what they compose, between the reality of the image and the reality language brings to it, and that the reality.we see, or rather expect to see, is the latter. This second pho-tograph is titled The Tip of my Tongue, 2000 (Fig. 2). 2

With respect to the reality the photograph denotes, we have either a man sticking out his tongue which happens to be a stick, or perhaps a man with a stick protruding from his mouth where his tongue ought to be, or perhaps a man with a stick stuffed into his mouth. In this case the denotative signifiers do not coalesce into a single denotated signified - the reality of the in1age eludes and frustrates our attempts to bring it in line with a signified reality constructed through language. There is no single successfUl denota-tion made by this photograph that is not absurd, while at the same time the trace of reality within the photograph is still obvious. The pieces this man is made up of are real, like the pieces of the woman in the previous photograph, as is the branch protruding from his mouth. All the denotative signifiers, before they are recognized as such, are real; it is what they come together as that is not. Which is what usually happens.

This photograph explicitly shows that the denotative signi-fied - the thing the picture appears to us to be - is simultaneously made from real things and a culturally inscribed fiction that has nothing to do with the reality of the image it is mapped onto. That is how to explain why tlus image is both perfectly sensible and ut-terly impossible. It is perfectly sensible insofar as the things it de-

z Mckean plate 24.

90

picts are real. It is just that these things are juxtaposed impossibly a judgement we come to because of our culturally conditioned

assumptions as to the nature of reality. It is when culture tries to enter the image, in the form of an understanding of the perception of it, that we believe the image to be false. Tongues cannot be sticks, we say to ourselves, everyone knows that. This is because the reality language projects fails to anchor in the reality the image por-trays - a failure that implies a gap between the reality of language and the reality of the image. When the reality of language, of cul-ture, judges the reality of the image to be impossible, it reveals its difference from the image and its parasitic relation to the reality of the image.

Thus the denotative reality of the photograph is not the trace of tl1e real within the photograph but instead the first depar-ture from the reality of the image and the first apprehension of the photograph by language. It is more accurate to claim that the deno-tative signification grafted onto the photograph at best coincides with the reality of the photograph - there is no necessary relation be-tween them. It takes a photograph that lies, which is to say a photo-graph whose reality does not coincide with that anticipated by lan-guage, to reveal the subtle process by which all photography lies by passing itself off as the truth.

part two

Barthes' theory of the photograph ontology re-mained constant through to the end of his career. However, his real-ist stance is applicable only so far as the ontology of photography extends itself, and for a poststructuralist that is not very far. He himself says that the question of whether or not the photographic image is coded is not very, if at all, usefi.tl to the analysis of photog-raphy; For Barthes, the essence of a photograph has nothing to do with its resemblance to reality: "Photography's noeme [essence J has nothing to do with analogy (a feature it shares with all kinds of rep-

til

resentations )."3 This moves the analysis of photography to a very different ground, a ground that is defined by the delicate balance between the essential and the contingent, between what the photo-graph is and the contingency of its reading. a balance that permeates Barthes' Camera Lucida. This balance is achieved by the subtle differ-entiation of the perception - the phenomenology - of the photo-graph from its essence. In Kantian terms, this is the discrimination between phenomena and noumena, the latter being the tmth of the pho-tograph which in no way affects its meaning, the former, the inverse.

This differentiation is so subtle that it is possible to over-look it, particularly in the theory of the punctum, a style of viewing that Barthes explicitly opposes to the culturally mediated studium. The latter, an extension of Barthes' earlier writings, is another name for the process by which the denotated image is caught up in conno-tative cultural codes. This in contrast with the punctum, which is not coded4, "which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [its viewer ]."5 This agency attributed to the image is easy enough to correlate with the essential but Barthes is more sophisticated than this reductive conflation.

Barthes was a close reader of Lacan, beginning in the very late I960s,6 which was the moment in Lacan's writing when he turned his emphasis from the exploration of what he termed the Symbolic register of his psychoanalytic theory towards the Real. With this in mind, Barthes' statement _that "the Photograph ... is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tu.che, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression"7 takes on a very complicated meaning, a

3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, !981) 88.

4 Barthes, Camera Lucida 55. 5 Barthes, Camera Lucida 26. 6 Roland Barthes, RoLmd Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard How-

ard (Berkeley: University of California Press, I977c) 145. ?Barthes, Camera Lucida 4, last emphasis mine.

meaning I will explore through an analysis of the photograph of his mother Barthes calls The Winter Garden Photograph.

First, I am obliged to observe that 11le Winter Gardm P!Joto-graph is not a photograph of Barthes' mother, Henriette Barthes, but instead a photograph of a girl named Henriette Binger. A five-year-old girl is not a grown woman who has birthed a child, neither is she the almost ninety-year-old woman she was when she died. What Barthes identifies as his mother is not literally, not really her. The fact tl1at Barthes does not reproduce The Winter Garden Photograph in Camera Lucida is perhaps the soundest indication that he is very much aware that the encounter with the real, that is the punctum, has noth-ing to do with the ontological reality of the photograph. He con-firms this by writing: "I cannot reproduce T!Je Winter Garden Photo-graph. It exists only for me."8 Such a personal reality can have noth-ing to do with the obstinately universal essence of the photograph but instead some other quality of it.

What exactly is it that Barthes finds in The Winter Garden Photograph that is so intensely his mother? It is

the distinctiveness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding herself, and finally her expression, which distinguished her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup ... all this had transfonned the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of gentleness. In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had fonned her being immediately and forever. 9

And is this really something real? Is it really a quality that the pho-tograph alone isolated and preserved, and is therefore essential to it? Literally, yes, but who other than Barthes could possibly recognise this essence of his mother for what it is? Who else would know that

8 Barthes, Camera Lucida 73. 9 Barthes, Camera Lucida 69.

tJS

it means precisely this? Who else would know the intensity with which it means precisely this? This is to say that although what Barthes identifies in the photograph is, or more precisely was, tl1ere, it is not the image qua sign, but rather a construction. Barthes insists that the punctum is not coded; however, I believe that it is.

I believe the difference in our use of the word stems from our different interpretations of Lacan's statement that the uncon-scious is structured like a language.I0 The unconscious is both simi-lar to language and in some equally important way different from it. It is a signifying system that operates according to principles like those of language but, unlike language, does not operate in the social sphere. When Barthes says codes, I suggest that he is referring to the codes that circulate within language, within social discourse, within consciousness, and that this definition of code is the limit of his use of the word in Camera Lucida.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes is coricerned with reclaiming the photograph for very personal pleasures - in freeing it from the play of cultural codes in order to immerse it in himself. In this context the word "codes" stands in for the enemy, the cultural apparatus that simultaneously buries the photograph and puts it into circulation in social discourse; codes are the agents of the studium. If codes are un-derstood to be the agents and components of culture, of the La-canian symbolic order, then of course the punctum is not coded -after all, it is something that is intensely personal and absolutely not social.

Even if the cultural codes which constitute the studium are not at play in the punctum there is nevertheless something producing the meaning of the punctum that is very much like language insofar as it brings to the photographic thing some meaning. Barthes writes that "whether or not [the punctum J is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there."II If the punctum is in part an addition, where does it come from? The

IO Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book IlL The Psychoses, trans. Russell Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993) 167.

II Barthes, Camera Lucida 55.

94

Winter Garden Photograph conjures memories of his mother for Barthes, memories he knew he had but that nonetheless escaped his recollec-tion, his consciousness. The Winter Gardm Photograph evoked those tangible but unreachable memories in a manner much like the studium evokes cultural codes. It remains, then, to identifY the signifying system whose component codes are memories and which evokes them.

In The Interpretation ?f Dreams (the text that is a part of the foundation of Lacan's return to Freud) Freud writes that

our memories - not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds - are in themselves uncon-scious. They can be made conscious; but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition.12

It is the unconscious, the signifYing system that is according to Freud the indiscriminate accumulation of all memory, that is the signifYing system which produces the meaning of the punctum, as lan-guage produces the meaning of the studium. The signifYing gesture, that produces the punctum and makes one thing stand for another, is the displacement of some unconscious memory onto the photograph qua signifier. The Winter Gardm Plwtograph is a photograph of his mother as a girl, and Barthes obviously has no memory of her as such. This photograph can therefore not be the evocation of a liter-ally remembered moment. Instead the photograph stands in for the

figure of his mother without being the mother he re-members, a signification produced by the forces governing the un-consCious.

This is, in Lacanian terms, also the real of the photograph, which is the measure of complexity surrounding the use of the term that I alluded to earlier:

n Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 4: Tl1e luterpretatio11 ?f Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1967) 689.

e;s

On the one hand, the tenn "the real" seems to imply a simplistic notion of an objective, external reality, a material substrate which exists in itself, independently of any ob-server. On the other hand, such a 'nai've' view of the real is subverted by the fact that the real also includes such things as hallucinations and traumatic dreams. The real is thus both inside and outside.U

So in one sense, the real of the photograph is the always elusive thing - the real that is outside; in another, it is the evocation of the real within the subject- the real that is inside, in the unconscious.

Thus the photograph is real in both the interior and exterior senses of the tenn. Returning to Barthes' definition of the photo-graph that I cited earlier- "in short, [the photograph is J what La-can calls the Tuche, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its inde-fatigable expression" 14 the real that the photograph is an encoun-ter with is both the real inside and out: it is the inescapable particu-larity of the thing-in-itself and the inescapably particular memories each of has (or doesn't have) of it.

In contrast to his ruthless pursuit of the signifYing forces motivating the studium, Barthes grants the unconscious the liberty of ambiguity: he is content to let it roam through his experience and writing without monitoring it. The fact that Barthes did this is not an oversight on his part, rather it is a rhetorical effect. The text is more a polemic than a work of theoretical analysis; Barthes intended it as a guide to the viewing of photographs, not an explanation -this is why he uses phenomenological methods, which is to say methods grounded in subjective experience. He wanted to write about what he did, so as to present himself as a model to be imitated. Thus he could not write about the unconscious. Barthes writes from a position where he is subject to the unconscious, and as such he docs not write about it as he does write from it. From this position, the unconscious takes on a certain palpability, a certain unquestion-

13 Dylan Evans, A11 Iutroductory Dictionary of Laca11ian Psychoa11a/ysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 160.

14 Barthes, Camera Lucida 4.

96

able reality: this because if what the unconscious were doing was revealed, explained, put into language, it would hardly be uncon-scious.anymore. Barthes sacrifices the theoretical coherency of Cam-era Lucida in order to make it more effective as an imitation of experi-ence and consequently as a guide to be imitated.

The explanation of the punctum as the product of uncon-scious signifying forces also ties in neatly as an explication of the objective of the polemic function of Camera Lucida. Barthes is attrib-uting a personal quality to the photograph, an agenda that is severely complicated by poststructuralist theories of the subject. I refer to the work of Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, all of which claim that the self is both produced by and inextricable from the social dis-courses we all necessarily participate in. This raises the following dilemma: if the person as such is inextricably a part, a product even, of the cultural field, how different can it be to appreciate photo-graphs personally? Is doing so not simply a repetition of the cultural field, albeit in a different discursive theatre? By providing a theoreti-cal location for the punctum in the unconscious I have provided, in the precise theoretical teru1S Barthes avoided, an explanation of a poststructuralist understanding of what exactly can be personal about the appreciation of photography and what is "real" about that appreciation.

97

9S

Fig. I

Dave Mckean. Serrated Edges, 2000. rpt. in Dave Mckean, A Small Book of Black and White Lies (Rome: Allen Spiegel Fine Arts, 2000)

plate 18.

Fig. 2

Dave Mckean. TI1e Tip of my Tongue, 2000. rpt. in Dave Mckean, A Small Book of Black and White Lies (Rome: Allen Spiegel

Fine Arts, 2000) plate 24.