摘要：Roland Barthes wrote his text Camera Lucida (1980) in an attempt to uncover the very essence of what a photograph was. He writes, “The first thing I found was this. What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” (76) What Barthes argues is that whilst what the photograph always represents is inherently in the past, the subject is always a referent of reality, a real thing. For Barthes the photograph is not an optionally real thing that is referred to via image or sign, but rather the “…necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.” (76) Whilst painting can feign reality and represent what was not there, photography has the innate ability to only record what it sees, which for Barthes gives the photographic image an innate truth-value. He writes of this seemingly absurd characteristic:According to a paradoxical order – since usually we verify things before declaring them ‘true’ – under the effect of a new experience, that of intensity, I had identified truth and reality in a unique emotion, in which I henceforth placed nature – the genius – of photography, since no painted portrait, supposing that it seemed ‘true’ to me, could compel me to believe its referent had really existed.
