Elkins
What Photography Is

...for me photography is essentially not about art, society, or representation: I find seeing is essentially solitary, and photography is one of the emblems of that solitude.

Camera Lucida is both scapegoat and touchstone, marginal and model.

Like its author, who had recently lost his mother, Camera Lucida is unstable: on one page it lectures, and then suddenly it becomes a rhapsody or a soliloquy; at one point it is lucid, and then instantly nearly incomprehensible; in another place it is gentle and calm, then almost demented with sadness. The text pricks you, and then softens the hurt with prose: it mimics the punctum and its sterile salve, which Barthes calls studium. (For Barthes, studium is the punctum’s often uninteresting counterbalance: it means the trans- missible analysis of images, whatever is public and publishable and makes sense in classrooms. Studium has become the daily business of visual studies, a field Barthes would have disliked.)