Chapter 6

Race and reproduction in Camera Lucida

Shawn Michelle Smith

In his influential study of photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography ,Roland Barthes famously makes himself the measure of photographic meaning(1981: 9). The book, in his words, is an attempt ‘to formulate the fundamentalfeature’ of photography ‘starting from a few personal impulses’ to a few photo-graphs (8–9). In other words, Barthes seeks to discover the essential elementsof photography through his own particular responses to images. It is thisprofoundly personal treatment of photography that lends Camera Lucida bothits most evocative power and its most frustrating limitations.Barthes’s work has been tremendously important and generative, both theo-retically and methodologically, for photography scholars, and especially for thosewho study family photography. As this work has demonstrated, the personal canbe a powerful point of departure for critical analysis, and as feminist scholars offamily photography insist, ‘the personal is political’. 1 Therefore, it is importantto reconsider Barthes’s individualized path to the universal in Camera Lucida , torecognize the political import of his ‘personal impulses’. A close reading of thetext discovers that many of Barthes’s most important and influential insights areinformed by complicated, and sometimes vexing, personal–political inclina-tions. Indeed, Barthes’s very conception of photography is laden with anxietiesabout race and reproduction. 2 Focusing on Barthes’s articulation of the punctum , the detail that draws oneinexplicably to an image, and the that-has-been , the photograph’s unique testi-monial, this essay traces manifestations of sexual and racial inquietude in CameraLucida . It explores the tangle of racial and sexual problematics that pervadesBarthes’s text with the ultimate aim of suggesting how one might utilizeBarthes’s most compelling and significant insights without reproducing theracial and sexual impulses his text sets forth.

The punctum

In Camera Lucida Barthes identifies two elements fundamental to discerningphotographic meaning – the studium and the punctum . As subsequent scholarshave rehearsed, he suggests that the studium includes the cultural knowledge