Towards Redemption: Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on Photography
View/ Open
Thesis.K.Yacavone.doc (13.21Mb)
Date
2008Author
Yacavone, Kathrin
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis compares and contrasts the multiple discourses on photography found in
the critical and theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. It seeks
to demonstrate that despite the different historical, philosophical, cultural, and
linguistic contexts of their work, Benjamin and Barthes engage with a similar
constellation of questions and problems that photography uniquely poses. It argues
that each author moves towards a practice of redemptive criticism as foregrounded in
relation to one privileged photograph in each case (the childhood portrait of Franz
Kafka, for Benjamin, and the photograph of the mother-as-child for Barthes).
Dedicated to a close reading of relevant texts by each author, the study is divided
into three parts, with each corresponding to a different set of themes to which the
photographic is related.
The first part focuses on the historical and evolutionary development of
Benjamin’s and Barthes’s view of photography in the context of wider shifts in their
critical practice and methodology, and then in comparison with each other. The
second part investigates the complex historical and philosophical influence of
Proustian aesthetics on their writing on photography. Suggesting that Proust’s
philosophy of memory provides an apt point of departure for Benjamin’s and
Barthes’s discussion of photography in relation to memory, it traces how each
thinker then moves beyond the Proustian conceptual framework towards similar
ends. The third and final part is devoted to Benjamin’s and Barthes’s
conceptualisation of photography in relation to singularity. Specifically, it centres on
how certain photographs convey singularity as a function of the relation between the
photograph, its referent, and its beholder.
In total, this study argues that Benjamin and Barthes rightly deserve their
often acknowledged places as pioneering figures in the theory of photography.
However, while both theorists provide numerous important insights into the
historical, cultural, and phenomenological nature and function of the medium, their
writing on photography is also marked (perhaps necessarily, in some cases) by
ambiguities, contradictions, and problematic evaluative judgements (with respect to
both the medium and to particular photographs) which must be acknowledged in
order to gain a proper appreciation of their work in this area.