Photos

"I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography. What I intentionalize in a photograph (we are not yet speaking of film) is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order ot Photography. " - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

I wonder what Barthes would have thought of our super mediated society. There is perhaps no more ubiquitous form of communication, his Reference, than pictures, and to a large extant photography.

"it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred"

The it in photography is not real in our current sense of thinking. We can't reach out towards the newspaper and touch the fighters in Iraq, our fingers coming back bloodied and sandy. Yet photography is often, sometimes unconciously, perceived as the grounding of a news story. A story's credability can be seriously affected by the lack of a photo, or the presence of an inferior one.

If one is to look at photos through a Barthian lens, the importance of photography then becomes multiplied tenfold. The photo as a point of reference, a represenatation of History. We were not there, History is where we are not, but the photo can be/is a direct link to the reality under discussion. There has to have been something there for the photograph to exist.

Photoshop aside, as Barthes was discussing pure, real photography, Photos are not given serious enough consideration anymore. Webcams and live video streams via overheated laptops and overworked cameramen are the norm. But Photography is still here, perhaps because reality needs Reference to maintain its identity.